I mean no offense by this, but I'm in a similar boat to OP in terms of not fully "getting" the tech of Bitcoin (despite being a very technical person) and this explanation did not clear up anything for me. The density of technologies and keywords and buzzwords every time someone tries to "simply" explain Bitcoin is mind boggling.
People want to send money to others, so they go to their nearest accountant and ask the latter to write their transaction down, so it's formalized. All these accountants are in the same room and each one has a bunch of transactions to write down, but they need to figure out how to write them down a specific way.
When an accountant figures out how to write down the transactions he has at the moment, he yells "HA! I got it!" and the transactions to everyone else in the room, who goes "ugh, damnit", the accountant collects the fee from the people whose transactions he wrote down, and the cycle begins anew.
By sending BTC to other addresses,including a small fee, you broadcast transactions across the Bitcoin network, nodes collect these transactions in their mempool.
Every 10 minutes a miner finds the answer to a problem, and collects as many high fee paying transactions that will fit into a block of 1mb, awards himself 25btc and collects the fees. Miner broadcasts this block. Other nodes receive it,verify its validity and relay it.
Work then begins on finding the next block by miners.
