Sublime

Accounts were always bound into ledgers for a similar reason: loose-leaf entries could easily be fabricated, but a ledger with numbered pages became tamper-proof.

These abstract concepts were expressed with new bookkeeping techniques: accounts had two sections, debit and credit, and each transaction was therefore entered twice, once on the debit side, once on the credit; ample cross references connected different customer or commodity accounts; a final financial result was summed out of the combined income;

Distributing the ledgers Adding new transaction to the ledgers Deciding which ledgers represents the truth

The blockchain is also a distributed, public, time-stamped asset ledger that keeps track of every transaction ever processed on its network, allowing a user’s computer to verify the validity of each transaction such that there can never be any double-counting.

What makes the Farolfi ledger a key document in European history – indeed, world history – is that this wreck of a notebook is the first place where we see all the abstract concepts of accountancy, and the practical techniques by which they were managed, used at once. For all their sophistication, earlier civilisations – Greeks, Arabs, Chinese – ha