One of the most important historical personalities in the business world who is unfamiliar to many people, Fr. Luca Pacioli (1447-1517). He was a Franciscan friar, a renaissance man, and Leonardo da Vinci’s math teacher. All that was not what made him important. What made him important was that he was “The Father of Modern Accounting”.
So let’s try to understand how an accountant from the Renaissance period can be the reason for today’s blockchain technology. In 1494: Pacioli systematized ledgers, which is double entry bookkeeping. Our entire financial system in the modern world is based upon ledger, and Pacioli’s ledgers are present everywhere in our modern society.
For example: If you send a 1000$ cheque to your friend, then he needs to deposit it in his bank account and through a series of entries in the ledger, a 1000$ will be transferred from your account to your friends’ account.
On October 2008 a person came into the scene by the name Satoshi Nakamoto. He was the founder of Bitcoin, and nobody knows who Satoshi Nakamoto is, he is a pseudonym. But putting aside that who Satoshi is, what Satoshi did is nothing short of an economic revolution. The discovery of bitcoin.
Bitcoin is just a ledger that is not based on trust, it’s a trustless ledger. Bitcoin is Satoshi’s ledger, his ledger is called a “blockchain”. A blockchain cuts out trust with cryptography ( in simple terms mathematics) Using this ledger you can send bitcoin to your friend without trusting anyone, and the transaction gets cryptographically locked on this blockchain.
How Britain got impacted?
There was an attempt to create virtual currency in the 1990s. Britain had an opportunity to play a major role in the 1990s crypto boom, but they fizzled due to various causes, some of them were frauds, financial problems.
But as of now the arrival of virtual currency in Britain has altered the way folks plan, advance and make use of their money. Many top listed business organizations in the UK have moved on to delve business action to facilitate them to inspect the unseen gems of bitcoin and other major cryptocurrencies. In Britain, authorities have categorized bitcoin and other virtual currencies as privately owned money. In Britain, Cryptocurrencies are put through capital gain tax and VAT taking into account profits and losses. Also, authorities are now more bothered in balancing the use of cryptos to ensure viable development for their nation and public.