On Thursday, Bitcoin's value fluctuated by thousands of dollars within 24 hours. The Coinbase app — which lets you buy and sell cryptocurrencies, experienced system crashes and errors due to the high user traffic. This is not how Bitcoin was supposed to work. The Bitcoin economy which is worth $276 billion is antithetical to the premise of Bitcoin. Let’s rewind to the start of Bitcoin, The first stop for anyone seriously interested in Bitcoin is the Bitcoin white paper. It is the canonical document written by Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, in 2008. “I've been working on a new electronic cash system that's fully peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party,” Nakamoto wrote when he posted the proposal to a cryptocurrency mailing list. This sentence describes everything Bitcoin was intended to be, and the qualities that first got people excited about it, the key terms being “cash,” “peer-to-peer,” and “no trusted third party.” In Nakamoto’s wor...