BITCOIN IS NONE OF THE THINGS IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE. The cryptocurrency was supposed to replace the finance industry. Instead, it has replicated it.
On Thursday, the price of Bitcoin fluctuated by thousands of dollars in a 24-hour period. The Coinbase app — which lets you buy and sell cryptocurrencies, and is the number two free app in the App Store as of this writing — started freezing and throwing errors, which the company said was due to high traffic. At one point, I tested the app by trying to sell some of my (very small) amount of Bitcoin, and the app simply buckled. “Bitcoin sales are temporarily disabled,” it said in an error message.
This is not how Bitcoin was supposed to work.
In fact, most of the current Bitcoin economy, worth around $276 billion at the time of writing, is antithetical to the premise of Bitcoin.
Let’s go back to the beginning of Bitcoin. The first stop for anyone seriously interested in Bitcoin is the Bitcoin white paper: 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.”
POD Research: Interesting Read:
https://theoutline.com/post/2592/bitcoin-is-none-of-the-things-it-was-supposed-to-be?zd=2&zi=b5ui3wgo
