Overview

Nicholas Szabo is an American computer scientist, legal scholar, and cryptographer known for his research in smart contracts and digital currency.

Education

Szabo graduated from the University of Washington in 1989 with a bachelor's degree in computer science and received a Juris Doctor degree from George Washington University Law School. 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 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 is set by mental transaction costs. In the 1990s, 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 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."