⭐Introduction

In 1920 the Tory MP Noel Skelton coined the phrase “property owning democracy”. In 1975 in her first speech at the Tory Party conference Margaret Thatcher declared her belief in this. She believed that everyone in Britain should own the property they lived in. She created the right to buy idea and gave the opportunity to council flat tenants to at last buy the homes they lived in. So the belief that a property was something you lived in, went to work from, and played with your children in the garden started slowly to change. Property all of a sudden became an asset. Michael Heseltine, put it later: "Home ownership stimulates the attitudes of independence and self-reliance that are the bedrock of a free society." Every working man and woman started to dream about owning their own property. Owning their own property slowly became the norm. From the day one started working their goals became to find a partner, get married then work towards owning their own home. The property they bought went up in price naturally this gave them the extra cash flow they needed. People started to take a portion of their investment and used it for certain luxuries they couldn’t afford before. They started to go on holidays to faraway places they never thought they could go before. Life was good. Home ownership in Britain grew from 55% of the total population in 1980 to 67% in 1990. In 2003 it peaked to 70.9%.

In mid 1980s the interest rates slowly started to rise. In 1988 the interest rate went up to 10% and kept on rising. The autumn of 1989 the interest rates went as high as 15%. In the autumn of 1990 Britain went into a recession for the first time since the great depression of the 1960s. People started to lose their jobs and this made them unable to pay their mortgages. Banks had no option but to reposes their properties. The recession lasted till 1993. Many people’s dreams were shattered. They lost the only thing they worked for all their life to the banks. People started rioting in the streets. Birmingham, Bristol, Oxford, Tyneside and Cardiff reacted to unemployment. Once major thriving towns were reduced to ghost towns with unemployment. The property market crashed. Those who had money bought a second home as an investment. People needed a place to stay so the rental market started to boom. Then again in 2007 the global economy started to shrink. Britain again went into a recession until 2012. Again more people lost their homes. Thriving towns were again reduced to ghost towns.

In 2016 the property ownership fell to 62.9%. Once a dream for the everyday working man to one day own his own property slowly started to disappear. Property prices reached a level where only rich overseas buyers could afford properties in London and the major cities. Kids never left their parents’ home even after started working. They simply couldn’t afford to buy a property with their own salaries. Government tried to introduce many schemes to encourage first time buyers to buy their own homes. Only a handful could get in the so called property ladder. In 2009 a man named Satoshi Nakamoto mined the first block of Bitcoin of 50 coins. While the Chancellor was announcing the second bailout to the banks Satoshi sent 10 Bitcoins to a programmer in the USA by the name of Hal Finney. It was the first ever Bitcoin transaction. After few obstacles and hiccups in 2011 the Bitcoin as we know it today emerged in a purer form. Since then other cryptocurrencies has started to evolve based on the Bitcoins open source code. Most notably Ethereum was created by a man named Vitalik Buterin through an online crowdsale. An open source Blockchain based distributed computing platform and operating system featuring smart contract was created.

Bitcoin needed a scripting language for application development whereas Ethereum had a more general scripting language. It made it easy for others to create various applications using the Ethereum Blockchain. Today anyone with basic knowledge of computing can create an application based on the Ethereum Blockchain protocol. In 2014 the first Ethereum based crowdsale known as the ICO was conducted. It raised $2.3 million in its first 12 hours. Since then there has been many Initial coin offerings and currently there are more than a 100 new coins created and offered for crowdsale a week. In 2014, Jed McCaleb, founder of Mt. Gox and co-founder of Ripple, launched the network system Stellar with former lawyer Joyce Kim. Before the official launch, McCaleb formed a website called "Secret Bitcoin Project" seeking alpha testers. The nonprofit Stellar Development Foundation was created in collaboration with Stripe CEO Patrick Collison and the project officially launched that July. Stellar was released as a decentralized payment network and protocol with a native currency, stellar. The cryptocurrency, originally known as stellar, was later called Lumens or XLM. In August 2014, Mercado Bitcoin, the first Brazilian bitcoin exchange, announced it would be using the Stellar network. By January 2015, Stellar had approximately 3 million registered user accounts on its platform and its market cap was almost $15 million.[