also, apps dedicated to this method of payment, including Venmo and PayPal.
Virtual currency is a digital representation of money and only available in electronic form.
The appeal of virtual currency is that it offers the promise of lower transaction fees than traditional online payment mechanisms do and is operated by decentralized authorities, unlike government-issued currencies.
Bitcoin quickly became the standard for virtual currencies. It was released in 2009 by the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto. All the
world's Bitcoin was worth just over $803.74 billion as of Dec. 12, 2023.
Virtual currencies like Bitcoin have no physical coinage because they are traded on exchanges.
The concept of banking dates back thousands of years, with early forms of banking emerging in ancient civilizations such as Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome.
The concept of banking for the first time started from the Mesopotamian civilization in 8th century B.C.E. This time economic activity was highly centralized about the royal houses and the priesthood.
The temples and royal palaces were the important centers to which commodities were deposited and from which they were redistributed among the peoples. These were the places that offered best security to guard the deposited wealth of the people, probably in the forms of crops and daily uses commodities as well as precious stones.
So, it was in the temples and royal palaces of Mesopotamia, that the earliest banking industry of the world developed and the notions of safeguarding of the deposits took place.
Historical records from Greece, Rome, Egypt, and Babylon suggest that temples loaned money in addition to keeping it safe. The fact that temples often functioned as the financial centers of their cities is one
reason why they were inevitably ransacked during wars.
Coins could be exchanged and hoarded more easily than other commodities, such as 300-pound pigs, so a class of wealthy merchants took to lending coins, with interest, to people in need of them. Temples
typically handled large loans, including those to various sovereigns, while wealthy merchant money lenders handled the rest.
The Knights Templar, a religious military order, provided secure storage for valuables and facilitated the transfer of funds for pilgrims traveling to the Holy Land. Their financial network laid the groundwork for modern banking practices.