Nick Szabo

Last updated
Nick Szabo
Born (1964-04-05) April 5, 1964 (age 60)
Alma mater
Scientific career
Fields
Website unenumerated.blogspot.com

Nicholas Szabo is a computer scientist, legal scholar, [1] and cryptographer known for his research in smart contracts and digital currency.

Contents

Personal life

Szabo currently resides in Seattle, Washington and is married to Michelle Szabo. [2]

Career

Szabo graduated from the University of Washington in 1989 with a degree in computer science [2] and received a Juris Doctor degree from George Washington University Law School. [3] He holds an honorary professorship at the Universidad Francisco Marroquín. [4]

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 protocols between strangers on the Internet. [5] 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.[ citation needed ]

Szabo argued that a minimum granularity of micropayments is set by mental transaction costs. [6] [7] At one time[ when? ] Szabo was a proponent of "extropian" life extension techniques. [8]

In 1998, Szabo designed a mechanism for a decentralized digital currency he called "bit gold". [9] [10] Bit gold was never implemented, but has been called "a direct precursor to the Bitcoin architecture." [11] 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." [9]

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 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. [12] [13] (see also: proof-of-work system).

Although Szabo has repeatedly denied it, people have speculated that he is Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin. [14] Research by financial author Dominic Frisby provided circumstantial evidence but, as he admits, no proof exists that Satoshi is Szabo. [15] In a July 2014 email to Frisby, Szabo said "I'm afraid you got it wrong doxing me as Satoshi, but I'm used to it." [16] Nathaniel Popper wrote in The New York Times 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. [2]

Related Research Articles

A smart contract is a computer program or a transaction protocol that is intended to automatically execute, control or document events and actions according to the terms of a contract or an agreement. The objectives of smart contracts are the reduction of need for trusted intermediators, arbitration costs, and fraud losses, as well as the reduction of malicious and accidental exceptions. Smart contracts are commonly associated with cryptocurrencies, and the smart contracts introduced by Ethereum are generally considered a fundamental building block for decentralized finance (DeFi) and non-fungible token (NFT) applications.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Adam Back</span> British cryptographer and cypherpunk (born 1970)

Adam Back is a British cryptographer and cypherpunk. He is the CEO of Blockstream, which he co-founded in 2014. He invented Hashcash, which is used in the bitcoin mining process.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hal Finney (computer scientist)</span> Cryptograph and cypherpunk

Harold Thomas Finney II was an American software developer. In his early career, he was credited as lead developer on several console games. He later worked for PGP Corporation. He was an early Bitcoin contributor, and received the first Bitcoin transaction from the currency's creator Satoshi Nakamoto.

Double-spending is the unauthorized production and spending of money, either digital or conventional. It represents a monetary design problem: a good money is verifiably scarce, and where a unit of value can be spent more than once, the monetary property of scarcity is challenged. As with counterfeit money, such double-spending leads to inflation by creating a new amount of copied currency that did not previously exist. Like all increasingly abundant resources, this devalues the currency relative to other monetary units or goods and diminishes user trust as well as the circulation and retention of the currency.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bitcoin</span> Decentralized digital currency

Bitcoin is the first decentralized cryptocurrency. Nodes in the peer-to-peer bitcoin network verify transactions through cryptography and record them in a public distributed ledger, called a blockchain, without central oversight. Consensus between nodes is achieved using a computationally intensive process based on proof of work, called mining, that secures the bitcoin blockchain. Mining consumes large quantities of electricity and has been criticized for its environmental impact.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Satoshi Nakamoto</span> Pseudonym of the designer and developer of Bitcoin

Satoshi Nakamoto 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 implementation, Nakamoto also devised the first blockchain database. Nakamoto was active in the development of bitcoin until December 2010.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bitcoin protocol</span> Rules that govern the functioning of Bitcoin

The bitcoin protocol is the set of rules that govern the functioning of bitcoin. Its key components and principles are: a peer-to-peer decentralized network with no central oversight; the blockchain technology, a public ledger that records all bitcoin transactions; mining and proof of work, the process to create new bitcoins and verify transactions; and cryptographic security.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gavin Andresen</span> US-based software developer

Gavin Andresen is a software developer known for his involvement with bitcoin. He is based in Amherst, Massachusetts.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of bitcoin</span> Cryptocurrency

Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency, a digital asset that uses cryptography to control its creation and management rather than relying on central authorities. Originally designed as a medium of exchange, Bitcoin is now primarily regarded as a store of value. The history of bitcoin started with its invention and implementation by Satoshi Nakamoto, who integrated many existing ideas from the cryptography community. Over the course of bitcoin's history, it has undergone rapid growth to become a significant store of value both on- and offline. From the mid-2010s, some businesses began accepting bitcoin in addition to traditional currencies.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nxt</span> Cryptocurrency

NXT is an open source cryptocurrency and payment network launched in 2013 by anonymous software developer BCNext. It uses proof-of-stake to reach consensus for transactions—as such, there is a static money supply. Unlike Bitcoin, there is no mining. NXT was specifically conceived as a flexible platform around build applications and financial services, and serves as basis for ARDR (Ardor), a blockchain-as-a-service multichain platform developed by Jelurida, and IoTeX (cryptocurrency) the current steward of NXT as of 2021. NXT has been covered extensively in the "Call for Evidence" report by ESMA.

A blockchain is a distributed ledger with growing lists of records (blocks) that are securely linked together via cryptographic hashes. Each block contains a cryptographic hash of the previous block, a timestamp, and transaction data. Since each block contains information about the previous block, they effectively form a chain, with each additional block linking to the ones before it. Consequently, blockchain transactions are irreversible in that, once they are recorded, the data in any given block cannot be altered retroactively without altering all subsequent blocks.

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Andreas Markos Antonopoulos is a British-Greek Bitcoin advocate, tech entrepreneur, and author. He is a host on the Speaking of Bitcoin podcast and a teaching fellow for the M.Sc. Digital Currencies at the University of Nicosia.

Wei Dai is a computer engineer known for contributions to cryptography and cryptocurrencies. He developed the Crypto++ cryptographic library, created the b-money cryptocurrency system, and co-proposed the VMAC message authentication algorithm.

Segregated Witness, or SegWit, is the name used for an implemented soft fork change in the transaction format of Bitcoin.

A cryptocurrency wallet is a device, physical medium, program or an online service which stores the public and/or private keys for cryptocurrency transactions. In addition to this basic function of storing the keys, a cryptocurrency wallet more often offers the functionality of encrypting and/or signing information. Signing can for example result in executing a smart contract, a cryptocurrency transaction, identification, or legally signing a 'document'.

In blockchain, a fork is defined variously as:

A blockchain is a shared database that records transactions between two parties in an immutable ledger. Blockchain documents and confirms pseudonymous ownership of all transactions in a verifiable and sustainable way. After a transaction is validated and cryptographically verified by other participants or nodes in the network, it is made into a "block" on the blockchain. A block contains information about the time the transaction occurred, previous transactions, and details about the transaction. Once recorded as a block, transactions are ordered chronologically and cannot be altered. This technology rose to popularity after the creation of Bitcoin, the first application of blockchain technology, which has since catalyzed other cryptocurrencies and applications.

Stuart Haber is an American cryptographer and computer scientist, known for his contributions in cryptography and privacy-preserving technologies and widely recognized as the co-inventor of the blockchain. His 1991 paper "How to Time-Stamp a Digital Document”, co-authored with W. Scott Stornetta, won the 1992 Discover Award for Computer Software and is considered to be one of the most important papers in the development of cryptocurrencies.

Colored Coins is an open-source protocol that allows users to represent and manipulate immutable digital resources on top of Bitcoin transactions. They are a class of methods for representing and maintaining real-world assets on the Bitcoin blockchain, which may be used to establish asset ownership. Colored coins are bitcoins with a mark on them that specifies what they may be used for. Colored coins are also considered the initial step toward NFTs built on top of the Bitcoin network.

References

  1. ↑ Ridley, Matt (4 December 2017). "The Bitcoin revolution is only just beginning" . The Times. Retrieved 23 December 2017. the legal scholar and computer scientist Nick Szabo
  2. 1 2 3 Popper, Nathaniel (15 May 2015). "Decoding the Enigma of Satoshi Nakamoto and the Birth of Bitcoin". The New York Times . Retrieved 8 January 2017.
  3. ↑ Szabo, Nick (26 May 2009). "Unenumerated, "Sotomayor, Calabresi, and the Chief Justice at our moot court"" . Retrieved 20 March 2019.
  4. ↑ "Portada 2021".
  5. ↑ Szabo, Nick (September 1997). "Formalizing and Securing Relationships on Public Networks". First Monday . 2 (9). doi: 10.5210/fm.v2i9.548 . S2CID   33773111 . Retrieved 8 January 2017.
  6. ↑ Szabo, Nick. "Micropayments and Mental Transaction Costs". CiteSeerX   10.1.1.23.9779 .{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  7. ↑ Szabo, Nick. "The Mental Accounting Barrier to Micropayments". Archived from the original on 12 January 2013. Retrieved 8 January 2017.
  8. ↑ "Everybody Freeze! | Corey Pein". 8 March 2016.
  9. 1 2 Peck, Morgan (30 May 2012). "Bitcoin: The Cryptoanarchists' Answer to Cash". IEEE Spectrum . Retrieved 8 January 2017.
  10. ↑ Szabo, Nick (December 2005). "Bit gold" . Retrieved 8 January 2017.
  11. ↑ O'Leary, Martin (8 May 2015). "The Mysterious Disappearance of Satoshi Nakamoto, Founder & Creator of Bitcoin". The Huffington Post . Retrieved 8 January 2017.
  12. ↑ Tschorsch, Florian; Scheuermann, Björn (15 May 2015). "Bitcoin and Beyond: A Technical Survey of Decentralized Digital Currencies" (PDF). Retrieved 8 January 2017.
  13. ↑ Szabo, Nick (1998). "Secure Property Titles with Owner Authority" . Retrieved 8 January 2017.
  14. ↑ "Who Is The Real Satoshi Nakamoto? One Researcher May Have Found The Answer". TechCrunch . 5 December 2013. Retrieved 8 January 2017.
  15. ↑ Frisby, Dominic (2014) "Who is Satoshi Nakamoto?" In Bitcoin: The Future of Money?, p. 85-149. Unbound. ISBN   1783520779
  16. ↑ Frisby, Dominic (2014), p. 147
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