For years, American computer scientist Nick Szabo has been a pioneer in the world of cryptography, specifically via his participation as a true thought leader in the topics of digital currency, electronic commerce, and smart contracts. His blog, Unenumerated, is, as it’s tagline claims, a collection of writings on “an unending variety of topics,” ranging from economic law to history of commerce, to his thoughts on topics relevant to the current state of Bitcoin and other digital currency.

Despite his status as a leader in cryptocurrency, United States based Szabo has managed to remain relatively personally anonymous, letting his thoughts and his work speak for themselves. A Google search turns up little personal information, which no doubt contributed to Szabo frequently being named as the most likely candidate to be the true inventor of Bitcoin, acting under the alias Satoshi Nakamoto.

Szabo, despite being a latecomer to the movement , developed integral examples of the cypherpunk philosophy. The Cypherpunks were the first non-government scholars to explore cryptography and the applications and implications it held for the general public. Before the 1970s, research and practice of cryptography were limited to military and spy agencies. When the US government published The Data Encryption Standard in 1975, followed in 1976 by Diffie and Hellman’s Stanford research on public-key cryptography, New Directions in Cryptography, the field swelled. In the 1980s, Dr. David Chaum wrote on digital currency, including security and anonymity, which opened the door to Eric Hughes, Timothy May, and John Gilmore jointly founding the cypherpunk movement in the early 1990s. Hughes’ work, A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto, identified the group’s libertarian goals and their focus on privacy, defining both privacy needs and expectations, and rights to privacy.

It was into this emerging field that Nick Szabo first introduced his Bit Gold concept in 1998. Bit Gold, a decentralized and unforgeable proof of work-based currency system, was not only the first complete decentralized digital currency theory, cryptography experts, including Szabo and Nakamoto himself, state that Bit Gold was the true precursor to Bitcoin, which took the cryptocurrency world by storm in 2008, possibly forever transforming the financial transaction process internationally.

Bit Gold and its proof of work chains, each of which is attributed to the public key of a discoverer, is a truly trusted third party-independent, peer-to-peer currency exchange. Szabo established Bit Gold value through scarcity, difficulty in production, and security of storage and transfer. His studies on the philosophy of money and particularly the inherent faults in everything from barter systems to currency in the form of precious metals, collectibles, and so forth, factored heavily into the conceptualization of Bit Gold. Szabo is careful to state that Bit Gold was a concept or theory. It was never coded, and in fact, before the release of Bitcoin, Szabo publicly sent out a request for coders willing to make his concept a reality. It is unclear if he was seriously asking for coders to step up, or if it was a request made in jest.

When Bitcoin launched, a decade after Nick introduced the Bit Gold concept, Nick was silent. He was also silent when in 2012 Satoshi Nakamoto went silent himself. Within two years, the cryptology community was entertaining the possibility that Nick Szabo was Satoshi Nakamoto. Forensic linguist researchers claimed he was the most likely candidate. Journalists and researchers, including blogger Skye Grey, have also suggested Szabo was Satoshi. Szabo himself has repeatedly denied the claim on Twitter and in interviews.

While he did much for the conceptualization and development of digital currency, Szabo is perhaps best known for his thoughts on the smart contract portion of the blockchain. He first introduced the concept in 1994, stating that the smart contract is “a set of promises, specified in the digital form, including protocols within which the parties perform on these promises…”. He continues to write and interact with experts and the public on smart contracts and how they relate to various blockchain currencies, both on his blog and Twitter account.

What else is known about Szabo? He is a United States citizen whose parents were Hungarian immigrants. Szabo is in his early 50s and lives on the West Coast. He was awarded a BS in computer science and engineering from the University of Washington, and also earned a law degree from George Washington University. When questions about the true identity of Bitcoin’s founder were first arising, several media outlets erroneously stated that Nick was a law professor at George Washington University. In fact, there is no record of him ever being in academics, other than an honorary professorship from Universidad Francisco Marroquin.

Over the past several years, the previously reclusive Szabo has made several in-person public appearances, speaking at various public events including the Ethereum Developer Conference and the International Conference on Contract Simplification. He has also been featured as a guest on podcasts such as the Tim Ferriss Show, Let’s Talk Bitcoin! And the Bitcoin Knowledge Podcast. He has discussed topics traditionally of interest to him, including Byzantine fault tolerant protocol, digital currency, and other cryptography topics.

Szabo is unique in the computer science industry due to his ability to blend programming and coding with the law, particularly contract law. During a 2016 podcast interview on the Tim Ferriss show with guest Naval Ravikant, a long time admirer, Szabo stated that property and contract law are the building blocks of society. His goal is to discover how to integrate those building blocks in cyberspace, through the elimination of the trusted third party, using the proof of work concept built into the blockchain. He postulates that this is the path to integrating cryptocurrency and smart contracts into mainstream finance.







