Hello, everyone and nice to get so many insightful answers.
The most important features of Bitcoin are that it's maintained by the largest community of developers out of all the coins, and consequentially it has the largest test suite and debugging infrastructure.
It makes it really easy to pin-point bugs. I can't stress enough how important having test cases is for your project, whatever it may be, whether it's related to crypto or not.
Important point.
Bitcoin has a very reliable coder community, where flaws will be detected early before implementation and no risks are being taken. Many much smaller coins have a very flawed code review process.
A large and educated coder community reviewing code during testing times is indeed an important advantage for Bitcoin.
It saves you from a lot of future bug-hunting.
And luckily, it saves us from possible hacks, when hackers are prevented from detecting flaws faster because all flawes are removed before implementation.
We have seen so many hacks, where a flawed code was exploited and people lost money, like for Altcoin cross chain bridges recently or when Terra Luna failed.
Still, people are buying coins from unreliable coders like Tron from Justin Sun or even weaker DeFi coins like Acala Stablecoin from Web 3.
Unfortunately, some people will only learn after a loss.
One more thing that sets Bitcoin apart is the immense decentralization - in hashpower, full nodes, development and community.
For security, the first two are the most critical.
Most altcoins either don't have node decentralization or / and they have a flawed consensus mechanism (proof of stake) that simply gives the developers total power over the project. This allows them to change rules at will, but also allows authorities to press them to do such things. In Bitcoin, that's simply impossible.
A PoW coin without enough hashpower can be attacked similarly, and as a matter of fact most energy is pumped into Bitcoin PoW, which makes it most secure.
Yes, some coins are very centralized and have a single point of failure like Solana, when it was down several times or devs have much power like in Binance Coin or Tron.
And DeFi coins can easily print some more coins / tokens into existence.
Bitcoin is having a big advantage here.
Important would also mean for Bitcoin from a hacking-resistant point
It is nearly impossible to explain about
bitcoin security without getting into technical details.
No problem, I have received some very good answers here already.
The magic part of bitcoin is Proof-of-Work.
Yes, from what Experts have said so far, PoW is very hard or almost impossible to compromise instead of PoS, where more attack vectors can be found.
The second part is digital signatures. The fact that you use private and public keys to prove ownership of fortunes still seems mind blowing to me.
I have run into it recently, when I tried to create a Solana wallet or similar new Altcoins. Altcoin developers are not focussing on security.
Or even MEW is bitching around more and more every time.
Many Altcoins are leaving people vulnerable which is very concerning.
Bitcoin is better like Electrum for example. It's design is not so nice but Electrum is good tech and recommended by many experts.
Considering that OP wants answers that (ideally) are easy for non-technical peeps to digest, I think the following quote (from WO, of all places) is worth leaving here. Like shahzadafzal, I really like the term "public digital payments infrastructure".
"Public digital payments infrastructure" sounds like a very good explanation for Bitcoin.
