Nicholas Szabo is an American

computer scientist A computer scientist is a scientist who specializes in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation. Although computer scientists can also focus their work and research on ...

, legal scholar, and

cryptographer Cryptography, or cryptology (from "hidden, secret"; and ''graphein'', "to write", or '' -logia'', "study", respectively), is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of adversarial behavior. More gen ...

known for his research in smart contracts and

digital currency Digital currency (digital money, electronic money or electronic currency) is any currency, money, or money-like asset that is primarily managed, stored or exchanged on digital computer systems, especially over the internet. Types of digital cu ...

Personal life

Szabo currently resides in

Seattle Seattle ( ) is the most populous city in the U.S. state of Washington and in the Pacific Northwest region of North America. With a population of 780,995 in 2024, it is the 18th-most populous city in the United States. The city is the cou ...

, Washington and is married to Michelle Szabo.

Career

Szabo graduated from the

University of Washington The University of Washington (UW and informally U-Dub or U Dub) is a public research university in Seattle, Washington, United States. Founded in 1861, the University of Washington is one of the oldest universities on the West Coast of the Uni ...

in 1989 with a degree in

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, information, and automation. Computer science spans Theoretical computer science, theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, and information theory) to Applied science, ...

and received a

Juris Doctor A Juris Doctor, Doctor of Jurisprudence, or Doctor of Law (JD) is a graduate-entry professional degree that primarily prepares individuals to practice law. In the United States and the Philippines, it is the only qualifying law degree. Other j ...

degree from

George Washington University Law School The George Washington University Law School (GW Law) is the law school of George Washington University, a Private university, private research university in Washington, D.C. Established in 1865, GW Law is the oldest law school in Washington, D. ...

. He holds an honorary professorship at the Universidad Francisco Marroquín.

Payments and digital currency

The phrase and concept of "smart property" was developed by Szabo with the goal of bringing what he calls the "highly evolved" practices of contract law and practice to the design of

electronic commerce E-commerce (electronic commerce) refers to Commerce, commercial activities including the electronic buying or selling Goods and services, products and services which are conducted on online platforms or over the Internet. E-commerce draws on tec ...

protocols between strangers on the Internet. In 1994, he wrote an introduction to the concept and, in 1996, an exploration of what smart contracts could do. Nick Szabo proposed a digital marketplace built on these automatic, cryptographically secure processes. Szabo argued that a minimum granularity of

micropayments A micropayment is a financial transaction involving a very small sum of money and usually one that occurs online. A number of micropayment systems were proposed and developed in the mid-to-late 1990s, all of which were ultimately unsuccessful. A s ...

is set by mental transaction costs. At one time Szabo was a proponent of " extropian" life extension techniques. In 1998, Szabo designed a mechanism for a decentralized digital currency he called "bit gold". Bit gold was never implemented, but has been called "a direct precursor to the

Bitcoin Bitcoin (abbreviation: BTC; Currency symbol, sign: ₿) is the first Decentralized application, decentralized cryptocurrency. Based on a free-market ideology, bitcoin was invented in 2008 when an unknown entity published a white paper under ...

architecture." According to Szabo, he was specifically focused on the double spend problem: "I was trying to mimic as closely as possible in cyberspace the security and trust characteristics of gold, and chief among those is that it doesn't depend on a trusted central authority." In Szabo's bit gold structure, a participant would dedicate computer power to solving cryptographic problems. In a bit gold network, solved problems would be sent to the Byzantine fault-tolerant public registry and assigned to the

public key Public-key cryptography, or asymmetric cryptography, is the field of cryptographic systems that use pairs of related keys. Each key pair consists of a public key and a corresponding private key. Key pairs are generated with cryptographic alg ...

of the solver. Each solution would become part of the next challenge, creating a growing chain of new property. This aspect of the system provided a way for the network to verify and time-stamp new coins, because unless a majority of the parties agreed to accept new solutions, they couldn't start on the next problem. (see also:

proof-of-work system Proof of work (also written as proof-of-work, an abbreviated PoW) is a form of Cryptography, cryptographic proof (truth), proof in which one party (the ''prover'') proves to others (the ''verifiers'') that a certain amount of a specific computatio ...

). Although Szabo has repeatedly denied it, people have speculated that he is

Satoshi Nakamoto Satoshi Nakamoto ( – 26 April 2011) is the name used by the presumed pseudonymous person or persons who developed bitcoin, authored the bitcoin white paper, and created and deployed bitcoin's original reference implementation. As part of the ...

, the creator of

. Research by financial author Dominic Frisby provided circumstantial evidence but, as he admits, no proof exists that Satoshi is Szabo. In a July 2014 email to Frisby, Szabo said "I'm afraid you got it wrong

doxing Doxing or doxxing is the act of publicly providing personally identifiable information Personal data, also known as personal information or personally identifiable information (PII), is any information related to an identifiable person. The ...

me as Satoshi, but I'm used to it."Frisby, Dominic (2014), p. 147 Nathaniel Popper wrote in ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''NYT'') is an American daily newspaper based in New York City. ''The New York Times'' covers domestic, national, and international news, and publishes opinion pieces, investigative reports, and reviews. As one of ...

'' that "the most convincing evidence pointed to a reclusive American man of Hungarian descent named Nick Szabo." In 2008, prior to the release of bitcoin, Szabo wrote a comment on his blog about the intent of creating a live version of his hypothetical currency.

References

External links

*
Who is Nick Szabo, The Mysterious Blockchain Titan - unblock.net
* {{DEFAULTSORT:Szabo, Nick People associated with Bitcoin Living people Science bloggers 21st-century science writers American people of Hungarian descent 1964 births Cypherpunks