Today’s subject is Nick Szabo.

Nick is a polymath, meaning he is an expert in many different subject areas.
In his case, he is a:

• Computer scientist
• Economist
• Legal scholar
• Cryptographer

VIEW VIDEO HERE^^^^^

This guy has had quite the foresight with his ideas and things that have ended up coming to fruition in this crypto space.

He designed “Bit Gold” about a decade before Bitcoin, which has been called the predecessor for the Bitcoin architecture.
Bit gold would have worked so that participants would dedicate computer power to solve cryptographic puzzles and each solution for these puzzles would have served as a part of the next challenge. Sounds a bit like the beginning of a chain to me…
These solutions would then be reported to a Byzantine fault-tolerant public register.
Byzantine fault tolerance or BFT is a way to organize (in this case) a system of computers to address and defend against the failure of a system.

He even created the concept and phrase “smart contracts” way back in 1993.

He had the goal of bringing “highly evolved” practices of contract law together with the design of electronic commerce protocols between strangers on the internet.
Now we are seeing the huge growth of the implementation of smart contracts all over this crypto space with Ethereum and ERC20 tokens.

As with a number of other individuals I’ve previously covered in this “Discovering Satoshi” series, Nick Szabo has been hounded by people trying to solve the mystery of identifying the anonymous Bitcoin creator who goes by or at the very least, went by Satoshi Nakamoto.

Is it really even important anymore to put a face to the name?

What should be more important and more highly valued is what was created, not who specifically created it.

If you couldn’t tell already, I’m partial to learning more about a whole host of individuals who played a part in the creation and facilitation of this crypto space.

Lucky for us, Nick Szabo has a lot of thoughts on things like economics, cryptography and other topics, he’s also a great writer. He’s got a blog that I think is very much worth checking out if you’re interested in expanding your knowledge library. You can find it at unenumerated.blogspot.com.

His blog goes really in-depth and there’s a ton of material there for you to check out, he doesn’t post all too often, but when he does, it’s worth it.

Additional Reading/Sources:

Wiki
Twitter
Nick Szabo Blog
Interview with Tim Ferris
Similar Thoughts, Satoshi and Szabo
Shelling Out
Logical Emergence of Money from Barter
Byzantine Fault-Tolerace