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Complex is OK. I prefer to spend 100 days trying to understand than blindly accepting the things I don't.
I'm sorry but struggling to understand this point you made: <>
Could you ellborate?
Bitcoins are not stored as balances, but rather as the sum of incoming and outcoming transactions.
A transaction is basically a signed message that says: "Alice sends Bob 1 BTC". What miners and nodes do is, they 1) verify whether the message has been signed by Alice and not and impostor and 2) they verify whether Alice actually has the funds (read: a sufficient amount of BTC in incoming transactions) to send Bob 1 BTC. If both is true, Bob himself now has a sufficient amount of BTC in incoming transactions to send 1 BTC.
Basically, you can verify whether a bitcoin is "real" by following this chain of transactions upstream until you reach the block where the coins have been mined. Mined coins are issued in a special kind of transaction that requires no inputs. The integrity of this special issuance transaction and the block that enabled it, is given due to the blocks that are mined on top of it, ie. the blockchain.
Here's a more detailed, technical information on transactions as transactions are actually little scripts and not just simple messages:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/TransactionWallet and blockchain explorers such as blockchain.info interpret this ledger of transactions (ie. the blockchain) for you so that you don't have to follow each transaction back to its source yourself.