Nick Szabo
Nick Szabo is a computer scientist, legal scholar, and cryptographer. In the mid-1990s he published essays introducing the idea of smart contracts: computer protocols that embed contractual clauses in hardware and software so that breach is expensive for the attacker.
Bit gold
Szabo designed bit gold, a proposal for a decentralized digital currency based on proof-of-work strings and a Byzantine-fault-tolerant registry of ownership. He described it as originating in 1998 and published the design on his blog in 2005. It is widely cited as a direct precursor of Bitcoin.
Essays
His 2001 essay Trusted Third Parties Are Security Holes argued that protocol designers should minimize reliance on trusted intermediaries, an argument echoed throughout later cryptocurrency and secure-protocol design.
Timeline
- 1996Publishes 'Smart Contracts: Building Blocks for Digital Markets'.
- 2001Publishes 'Trusted Third Parties Are Security Holes'.
- 2005-12Publishes the bit gold design on his blog, Unenumerated.
- Type
- Person
- Era
- 1990s-present
- Known for
- Coining 'smart contract' (1990s); Bit gold proposal; Essays on trusted third parties as security holes
- Tags
- cypherpunks, smart-contracts, bit-gold, cryptography, digital-currency