The time I attempted to explain bitcoin to my parents I ended up starting with explaining how public key crypto works (to the best of my ability) and wound up dealing with so many tangential questions we barely managed to touch on bitcoin. I'm sure they took away almost nothing from an hour long conversation.

I think it is possible to understand bitcoin as a financial system if you have some background in financial concepts (my dad was able to pick up the open ledger concept pretty easily). But to understand the technical details you really need an implicit understanding of a lot of different technologies.