Nick Szabo

He graduated from the University of Washington in 1989 with a degree in computer science.⁠[1][2][3]

In a 2017 interview he recalled a group of the 1990s called the Cypherpunks, naming Timothy C. MayTimothy C. MayTimothy C. May (1951–2018) was a physicist and writer who, while at Intel, identified alpha particles as the cause of soft errors in dynamic memory chips; he wrote “The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto” in 1988, co-founded the Cypherpunks mailing list with Eric Hughes and others in 1992, and wrote “The Cyphernomicon,” a document in FAQ form.Open the full entry (whom he called Tim May), Eric HughesEric HughesEric Hughes is a co-founder of the Cypherpunks, the author of “A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto” (1993), and the writer of remailer software, programs that forward email anonymously, used by members of the Cypherpunks mailing list.Open the full entry and John GilmoreJohn GilmoreJohn Gilmore is an American programmer, entrepreneur and civil libertarian, an early employee of Sun Microsystems and a co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Cygnus Support and the Cypherpunks; in 1998 he led EFF’s construction of the DES Cracker, which broke DES encryption.Open the full entry among its participants; Tim May, he said, had a vision of “Galt’s Gulch in cyberspace,” and his own thought at the time was that people there would still need to enforce contracts and protect property.⁠[4]

In the 1990s he worked as a consultant for the digital cash company DigiCashDigiCashDigiCash was an electronic cash company founded in Amsterdam by the cryptographer David Chaum. It developed eCash, a payment system that used blind signatures to protect payers’ privacy, and licensed it to banks in several countries for trials; it moved its headquarters to Silicon Valley in 1997, filed for bankruptcy protection in November 1998, and its software and patents later passed to eCash Technologies.Open the full entry; in the same interview he said that he had worked for DigiCash, David ChaumDavid ChaumDavid Chaum is a cryptographer who introduced mix networks, blind signatures and the electronic cash system eCash, initiated the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR) and founded DigiCash in Amsterdam; he later developed voter-verifiable voting systems and leads the blockchain project xx network.Open the full entry’s company, which, he said, was doing a trust-based paper note issued by some central authority; he became dissatisfied with that model and wanted something that he calls “trust minimized”.⁠[5][4]

JAN3’s announcement of January 2025 and a CointelegraphCointelegraphCointelegraph is a digital news outlet covering blockchain, digital assets, artificial intelligence, and fintech, known for its cartoon-style news illustrations. It also runs businesses including Cointelegraph Magazine, research, an accelerator, and events.Open the full entry article of October 2024 both date his introduction of the term and concept of smart contracts to 1994.⁠[6][2]

A note to his 1997 paper in First Monday reads: “The author has been refining this idea since the early 1990’s.”⁠[3]

The show notes of The Tim Ferriss Show describe his aim in developing the phrase and concept as bringing the mature practices of contract law to the design of electronic commerce protocols between strangers on the Internet.⁠[7]

In the 2017 interview he described the vending machine as the primordial smart contract and remarked that legalese does not usually run on the brains of ordinary people; his 1997 paper had already called the vending machine the “primitive ancestor” of smart contracts.⁠[4][7][3]

On September 1, 1997, the journal First Monday published his paper “Formalizing and Securing Relationships on Public Networks” in volume 2, number 9.⁠[8]

The abstract states that smart contracts combine protocols with user interfaces to formalize and secure relationships over computer networks, with design objectives drawn from legal principles, economic theory and theories of reliable and secure protocols. It says that the article discusses the similarities and differences between smart contracts and traditional business procedures based on written contracts, controls and static forms, argues that cryptography and other security mechanisms can protect many algorithmically specifiable relationships from breach by the principals and from eavesdropping or malicious interference by third parties, notes limits arising from time, the user interface and the completeness of the algorithmic specification, and names credit, content rights management, payment systems and contracts with bearer as areas of application.⁠[8]

The author note at the end of the paper describes him as a computer science graduate of the University of Washington who “has worked with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, IBMIBMIBM (International Business Machines Corporation) is an American information technology company, renamed in 1924 from the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (C-T-R).Open the full entry, Sequent, DigiCash, Agorics, and Entegrity Solutions” in the areas of systems software, Internet commerce and enterprise security.⁠[3]

In a blog post of May 2011 he wrote that he had come up with the bit gold ideas in 1998, at the same time and on the same private mailing list where Wei DaiWei DaiWei Dai is a computer engineer and the original author of the open-source cryptography library Crypto++. In 1998 he proposed b-money, a scheme for anonymous digital money that the Bitcoin paper lists as its first reference, and the smallest unit of ether, the wei, is named after him. He also writes on LessWrong about decision theory and AI safety, and proposed the decision theory that came to be called Updateless Decision Theory.Open the full entry was coming up with b-money; a reply signed “nick” in the comments to that post gives the list’s name as libtech.⁠[9][10]

A Blockworks article states that libtech was a private mailing list that he founded in the late 1990s and on which he and Wei Dai both set out their ideas for bit gold and b-money; he later said, the article adds, that Hal FinneyHal FinneyHal Finney (1956–2014) was a software engineer and cryptographer, an early developer of the PGP encryption software, who released the reusable proof-of-work system RPOW in 2004; in January 2009 he ran the Bitcoin software released by Satoshi Nakamoto and received the first Bitcoin transaction.Open the full entry, the free-banking authority Larry White and the economist George Selgin were also on the list.⁠[10]

The same blog post says that bit gold was mostly not described in public until 2005, although he had described some of its pieces earlier, such as the Byzantine-replicated chain of signed transactions, which he later generalized into what he calls secure property titles.⁠[9]

In the 2017 interview he said that the bit gold design grew out of his research on the origins of money and on private banking, and that he wanted a trust-minimized form of scarcity; he said that he had adapted the Byzantine consensus methods used in aircraft systems to replicate transaction ledgers. Bit gold, he said, was a design: “I didn’t get around to programming BitGold.”⁠[4]

A Fortune article of May 2015 calls bit gold a predecessor of Bitcoin and states that he created its blueprint in 1998, using some of the same technology as Bitcoin.⁠[5]

His blog is called Unenumerated and carries the description “An unending variety of topics”; the archive in its sidebar lists the number of posts for each year from 2005 to 2018: 44 in 2005, 130 in 2006, 47 in 2007, 55 in 2008, 29 in 2009, 9 in 2010, 12 in 2011, 8 in 2012, 3 each in 2013, 2014 and 2015, 4 in 2016, 3 in 2017 and 1 in 2018.⁠[11]

In the 2017 interview Tim Ferriss asked about the link between the blog’s name and the Ninth Amendment to the United States ConstitutionConstitution of the United StatesThe Constitution of the United States is the fundamental law of the United States. It was drafted and signed in 1787 by the convention that met in Philadelphia, was ratified by the required number of states in 1788, and has been the basis of the federal government since 1789. It consists of a preamble and seven articles, establishes legislative, executive and judicial branches, and has since been supplemented by amendments.Open the full entry; he replied that Unenumerated stands for an endless variety of topics and that he does not want to peg himself to one subject, and that the name does relate to the amendment: technology will bring new things around which rights have to be defined, so one should not limit oneself to the old list of rights but adapt old ideas to the future.⁠[4][7]

The blog post “Bit gold” has the address path 2005/12 and displays the date December 27, 2008; its comments show only a time of day, and the timestamp carried in the permalink of the earliest comment corresponds to December 29, 2005.⁠[12]

The post opens: “A long time ago I hit upon the idea of bit gold.” The problem it sets out is that money depends for its value on trust in a third party; precious metals avoid that dependence through their scarcity, but they are too costly to assay for each transaction, need trusted minters, are risky to transport and cannot be used for payment online.⁠[12]

The scheme it describes proceeds in steps: a public challenge string is created; the user computes a proof-of-work string from it with a benchmark function; the proof of work is securely timestamped, preferably by several independent services; the user records the challenge and the timestamped proof of work in a distributed property title registry, again without reliance on any single server; the most recently created string of bit gold supplies the challenge for the next; ownership is verified through the registry’s unforgeable chain of title, made of digital signatures; and value is assessed by checking the challenge, the proof of work and the timestamp.⁠[12]

In the post’s account, control of bit gold depends on the chain of title in the registry and not on possession of the bits. It states: “Hal Finney has implemented a variant of bit gold called RPOW (Reusable Proofs of Work).” RPOW, the post says, uses a tamper-evident remote mint with remote attestation.⁠[12]

The post also sets out the scheme’s difficulties: the cost of a proof of work depends on computer architecture and not just on abstract mathematics, so a producer whose costs are lower by several orders of magnitude could swamp the market with bit gold; the time at which each string was created and the mathematical difficulty of the work can be proven automatically, the post says, and dealers will have to combine pieces of differing value into larger units of approximately equal value.⁠[12]

An article carried by NBCNBCNBC (National Broadcasting Company) is an American national commercial broadcast television network. It was founded by RCA in 1926, began as a radio network and later developed television. With ABC and CBS it is one of the three traditional U.S. broadcast networks; it passed to General Electric with RCA in 1986, merged with Universal to form NBCUniversal in 2004, has been controlled by Comcast since 2011, and is one of the five networks that rotate in the White House television pool.Open the full entry News states that he graduated from George Washington UniversityGeorge Washington UniversityGeorge Washington University (officially The George Washington University) is a university in Washington, D.C., United States, whose forerunner was Columbian College.Open the full entry in 2006 with a law degree; a 2024 Cointelegraph article states that he holds a Juris Doctor from George Washington University Law School.⁠[13][2]

In the 2017 interview he said that computer science came first and that he then went to law school to study what he calls wet code; the law degree, he said, is in large part based on smart contracts and served as a reality check on his computer science thinking.⁠[4]

The way of thinking that he calls quantum thought, he said, comes from law school, where students argue both the plaintiff’s and the defendant’s side; he compared it to Schrödinger’s cat, with both states held in mind at once, said that a few law school tests are enough to get used to it, and suggested imagining a courtroom and arguing each side in turn.⁠[4][7]

A CBS NewsCBS NewsCBS News is the news organization of the U.S. CBS system, part of Paramount, providing news coverage through television, the web and streaming. Its history extends from radio newsgathering to television and digital platforms; its signature programs include CBS Evening News, 60 Minutes and Face the Nation, and CBS News 24/7 is its streaming news service.Open the full entry article of April 2014 and CoinDeskCoinDeskCoinDesk is a cryptocurrency media, events, index, and data company founded in 2013 and headquartered in New York. Its businesses include the CoinDesk news website, the annual crypto industry conference Consensus, and the CoinDesk Indices index business. In November 2023, the digital asset exchange Bullish acquired CoinDesk from Digital Currency Group, and CoinDesk has since operated as an independent subsidiary of Bullish.Open the full entry’s article on the Aston University study described him as a former law professor at George Washington University; the article carried by NBC News states that several journalists and investigators of Bitcoin’s creator had said so and that, as The Wall Street JournalThe Wall Street JournalThe Wall Street Journal is a U.S. news publication founded in 1889, with a focus on business, finance and economics. It is published by Dow Jones, part of News Corp.Open the full entry pointed out, university officials say they have no records of his ever working there in that capacity.⁠[14][15][13]

The blog post “Bit gold markets” has the address path 2008/04 and likewise displays the date December 27, 2008; its comments show only a time of day, and the timestamp carried in the permalink of the earliest comment corresponds to April 9, 2008.⁠[16]

The post says that because the methods of solving puzzles keep improving, the bits solved in one period are not fungible with those of the next, but that fungible units can be created from non-fungible ones: dealers bundle solutions of differing value into pools of a standard value and divide each pool into tranches that serve as standard currency denominations; each solution is timestamped with the time of its publication and secure title exists only once it is published, so that the supply of each period is public and measurable, and arbitrage to set prices between periods can be computerized. It draws a comparison with rare postage stamps and then says that the comparison is misleading in other respects: demand for collectibles has a subjective aesthetic component and their scarcity is uncertain (forgeries, rediscovered items), which makes pooling them risky, whereas the demand for bit gold is purely for its monetary functions. Gold, the post argues, is likewise valued mainly for its monetary function and diamonds because they are hard to obtain, aesthetic features being only a signal of scarcity; it closes by saying that futures on bit gold not yet produced are hard to price, so that currency pools will be based on spot prices of bit gold already produced.⁠[16]

On July 20, 2010, in a BitcoinTalk forum thread about the proposed deletion of a WikipediaWikipediaWikipedia is a free, multilingual online encyclopedia launched on January 15, 2001, written collaboratively by volunteers around the world and hosted by the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation; it is one of the most visited websites in the world.Open the full entry article, Satoshi Nakamoto wrote that “Bitcoin is an implementation of Wei Dai’s b-money proposal” and in the same passage referred to “Nick Szabo’s Bitgold proposal.”⁠[17]

The Bitcoin paper, “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” has eight references, among them Wei Dai’s b-money and Adam BackAdam BackAdam Back is a British cryptographer and computer scientist, the inventor of the proof-of-work system Hashcash, and a co-founder and the chief executive of the Bitcoin technology company Blockstream.Open the full entry’s Hashcash; none is a work by Nick Szabo, and the text of the paper does not mention bit gold.⁠[18]

The Blockworks article states that in January 2011 he called Bitcoin “an implementation of the bit gold idea”; by its author’s count he had commented publicly on Bitcoin only twice before his post of May 2011, both times comparing it with bit gold.⁠[10]

On May 28, 2011, he published the blog post “Bitcoin, what took ye so long?”, answering the question raised in gwern’s essay of the previous day, “Bitcoin is Worse is Better,” of why Bitcoin had been so long in coming; he argued that the ideas behind bit gold and Bitcoin were nowhere near as obvious as gwern suggested and that Bitcoin is a complex system pursuing a very unpopular goal.⁠[9][10]

The post states: “Myself, Wei Dai, and Hal Finney were the only people I know of who liked the idea,” and says that the three of them were the only people he knew of who had pursued it to any significant extent before Nakamoto, Dai in the case of his own related idea; in parentheses he added “(assuming Nakamoto is not really Finney or Dai).” Only Hal Finney, with RPOW, and Nakamoto, he wrote, were motivated enough to actually implement such a scheme.⁠[9]

On why it took so long, he wrote that the greatest obstacle was the question of why anyone should do it: Bitcoin required unconventional thinking about trust, money and the way security protocols fit together, and many people considered the idea a bad one; gold bugs rejected it too, since real gold already existed and one could pay online with digital certificates backed by real gold held in vaults, in the manner of the formerly popular e-golde-golde-gold was a digital currency, described by its issuer as fully backed by physical gold, whose value could be transferred between accounts over the internet; it began operating in 1996 and ceased operations in 2009. Its issuer E-Gold, Ltd., its operator Gold & Silver Reserve, Inc. and three directors were indicted by a U.S. federal grand jury in 2007 on charges including money laundering conspiracy and operating an unlicensed money transmitting business, and pleaded guilty in 2008.Open the full entry; others insisted that money must first be useful for something else, a view he rebutted with his study of the origins of money.⁠[9]

Nakamoto, he wrote, had improved a significant security shortcoming of his own design by requiring a proof of work to take part as a node in the Byzantine-resilient peer-to-peer system, which reduces the threat of an untrustworthy party controlling the majority of nodes; Nakamoto also adjusted the difficulty of the puzzles with a Byzantine-agreed algorithm where he had envisaged an automated market, and he was not sure whether that was a feature or a drawback.⁠[9]

On December 10, 2011, he wrote in the blog post “Short takes”: “Bit gold and I make brief appearances in Wired’s Bitcoin article.”⁠[19]

A CBS News article of April 2014 states that a Wired article had him explicitly denying that he was Nakamoto; its author, Erik Sherman, adds that Szabo’s own writing can be read as a denial but that, read carefully, it does not exactly say that he and Nakamoto are not the same person.⁠[14]

In the same post he wrote that he had been studying, designing and implementing a programming style that he calls temporal programming and considers useful for, among other things, implementing smart contracts: it starts from event-oriented programming, takes it further and gives control over when instructions execute; he encouraged readers interested in programming to look at Node.js. A reply signed “nick” in the comments says that anyone who has used Unix cron to schedule jobs has had a taste of the style and that the basic building blocks of financial contracts are the future, the bond and the option.⁠[19]

Of the other two items in “Short takes,” one concerns NetflixNetflixNetflix is a U.S. entertainment company that offers streaming series, films, games, and live programming, headquartered in Los Gatos, California. Founded in 1997, it grew from online DVD rental into an international subscription entertainment service and also runs original content, advertising, and in-person experience businesses.Open the full entry’s streaming business and copyright law, summarizing the view of a writer whose name the post prints as Megan McCardle that under copyright law DVDs are covered by the first sale rule; the other shows videos of water and light displays.⁠[19]

“More short takes” of July 1, 2012, collects brief notes: on how occupations such as advertiser, salesperson, lawyer and financial trader extend useful social interactions far beyond the tribe-sized groups that humans evolved to live in (it mentions the Dunbar number); on the limits of the transfer of knowledge between minds; on the poor recording of transfers of ownership of mortgages, where he refers to his proposal of secure property titles; and on the simultaneous consideration of often mutually contradictory possibilities, which he calls quantum thought.⁠[20]

“Pascal’s scams” of July 14 gives that name to movements or belief systems that ask people to hope for or worry about very improbable outcomes that could have very large positive or negative consequences; the name comes from the wager proposed by Pascal. The proponents of such propositions, the post says, cannot propose a clear experiment that would greatly lower the probability.⁠[21]

“Pascal’s scams (ii)” of July 23 lists poorly evidenced but widely feared or hoped-for extreme consequences: a financial industry disaster even worse than that of 2008, disasters attributed to global warming, the fears of terrorist disaster that spread in the years after 9/11, and Eric Drexler’s predictions of the 1980s about molecular nanotechnology, among others; bubbles and depressions in financial markets, the post suggests, may be caused by optimistic and pessimistic Pascal fads.⁠[22]

“Three philosophical essays” of July 25 gives excerpts from three essays, titled “Algorithmic Information Theory,” “Objective versus Intersubjective Truth” and “Hermeneutics: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Tradition,” each linked to the site szabo.best.vwh.net; the excerpts concern what Bennett calls logical depth (the computational replacement cost of an object), the evolution of ideas through the interaction of people over many lifetimes, and Gadamer’s hermeneutics.⁠[23]

“Proxy measures, sunk costs, and Chesterton’s fence” of August 7 argues that when evidence is incomplete it can make a great deal of sense to use sunk cost as a proxy measure of value, so that attending to sunk costs, far from always being a fallacy or an irrational bias, may often lead to better decisions; it contains what he calls “my generalization of Chesterton’s fence.”⁠[24]

“Authority and ad hominem” of August 15 argues that appeals to authority and ad hominem arguments are the dominant forms of evidence that lead each individual to believe things, and that the two go together and rebut each other; an authority’s investment costs, the post says, are one good proxy measure for evaluating the value of such evidence.⁠[25]

“Dead reckoning and the exploration explosion” of October 18 states that between the Italy of the late 13th century and the advent of GPS dead reckoning formed the basis of most modern navigation and that it was the primary method of navigation in what he calls the exploration explosion of the late 15th and early 16th centuries; it describes the magnetic compass, the sand glass used to measure time and the traverse board used for recording.⁠[26]

“Dead reckoning, maps, and errors” of October 28 discusses the errors of dead reckoning: unknown factors that vary with place but are constant over time, such as magnetic variation, ocean currents and the curvature of the Earth, cause the largest errors when a route is plotted on a Ptolemaic map, while leeway from the wind and errors of measurement accumulate and have to be corrected by fixes on landmarks or soundings. He writes in it: “I’ve created a Ptolemaic map of the itineraries.”⁠[27]

The article carried by NBC News states that a researcher writing as Skye Grey argued in a blog post of December 1 of the previous year that “Satoshi is Szabo himself,” four days later said to TechCrunchTechCrunchTechCrunch is an American technology news outlet founded in 2005 by Michael Arrington and Keith Teare and headquartered in San Francisco; it mainly covers technology companies, startups, and venture capital, and hosts events such as TechCrunch Disrupt. Its ownership passed successively through AOL, Verizon, and Yahoo, and in 2025 Regent announced its acquisition.Open the full entry editor John Biggs that he was “not certain it’s Nick Szabo,” and then laid out several pieces of evidence that he called independent and that in his view pointed to Szabo; CoinDesk’s article of April 16, 2014, places Grey’s analysis of the Bitcoin paper in the preceding December.⁠[13][15]

The CoinDesk article states that Grey found that both Szabo and the author of the Bitcoin paper repeatedly used the phrase “trusted third party”; Grey pointed out that the paper cites Wei Dai’s b-money and hashcash but neither mentions bit gold nor cites any work by Szabo, and asserted that Szabo had deliberately post-dated his bit gold articles, shortly after Bitcoin was announced, so that they would look later than Bitcoin; Grey estimated that only 0.1 percent of cryptography researchers could have written such a text and suggested that the paper’s American English might be a deliberate attempt to hide its origin.⁠[15]

An Aston University release published on April 17, 2014, states that Jack Grieve, a lecturer in forensic linguistics there, led 40 final-year students in a study called Project Bitcoin, which compared the linguistic features of the Bitcoin paper with the writing of people often named as its possible authors: Dorian S. Nakamoto, Vili Lehdonvirta, Michael Clear, Shinichi Mochizuki, Gavin Andresen, Nick Szabo, Jed McCalebJed McCalebJed McCaleb is a programmer and serial entrepreneur, and a co-founder of Stellar and the Stellar Development Foundation. Before that he was involved with eDonkey, Mt. Gox, and Ripple; in 2014 he launched Stellar with Joyce Kim, and he later also invested in Vast and the Astera Institute.Open the full entry, Dustin D. Trammel, Hal Finney, Wei Dai, and Neal King, Vladimir Oksman and Charles Bry; the study analyzed hundreds of documents, including more than 40 academic papers on Szabo’s personal website, and found Szabo by far the closest linguistic match.⁠[28]

The shared traits listed in the release are phrases such as “chain of…,” “trusted third parties,” “for our purposes” and “need for…”; frequent use of “still,” “of course,” “as long as,” “such as” and “only”; contractions; commas before “and” and “but”; hyphenation; adverbs ending in -ly; the pronouns “we” and “our” in papers by a single author; sentence fragments after colons; and reflexive pronouns ending in -self. The release adds that double spacing after full stops in the Bitcoin paper could not be checked because its LaTeX source file is not available, and that Szabo uses LaTeX for all his publications.⁠[28]

Grieve said that “none of the other possible authors were anywhere near as good of a match,” while adding that contributions by others could not be ruled out; the study also challenged Newsweek’s claim that Dorian S. Nakamoto was the main author, a claim that, the release notes, Dorian S. Nakamoto strongly denied.⁠[14][28]

The article carried by NBC News wrote that the student sleuths seemed to be grasping at “pretty flimsy straws” and noted that Szabo, like Nakamoto, was said to deny being the mastermind behind Bitcoin; the CoinDesk article observes that co-authorship or involvement in editing the paper would not mean that Szabo created Bitcoin alone or wrote the whole paper, and mentions the theory that Satoshi is a name shared by a group of developers.⁠[13][15]

On July 2, 2014, he published a blog post titled “Tweeting” whose body consists of a single link, to the Twitter account NickSzabo4.⁠[29]

On December 11, 2014, he published the blog post “The dawn of trustworthy computing.” It argues that most web servers rest on full trust in whoever holds root access, which leaves users exposed to insiders and hackers; he describes a block chain computer as a virtual computer run across many machines and secured by cryptography and consensus.⁠[30]

The post calls Bitcoin a partial block chain computer that pioneered trustworthy computing: it lets people in distant countries pay each other without local institutions and supports multisig, but its limited language and small memory keep it from most fiduciary uses such as risk pools; it names EthereumEthereumEthereum is an open, general-purpose smart contract blockchain that launched in 2015, and its native asset is ether (ETH). The project was proposed by Vitalik Buterin and advanced jointly by eight co-founders; the network now uses proof of stake and centers on the EVM, the account model, a rollup scaling roadmap, and the open EIP process.Open the full entry and QuixCoin as projects implementing fuller schemes.⁠[30]

He writes that “trustless” is an exaggerated shorthand and that he uses the term “trust-minimized”: such code can be relied on without trusting the owner of any particular remote computer. By his very rough estimate block chain computing is about 10,000 times slower and more costly than a web server, roughly the cost of running a program on an ordinary computer in 1985, and he therefore proposes running on chain only the part of an application that most needs reliability and security, which he calls fiduciary code, giving as examples property titles, smart contracts with cryptocurrency collateral and on-chain treasuries under multisig control. He closes by saying that he hopes to discuss block chain applications, smart contracts especially, in later posts.⁠[30]

In May 2015 Nathaniel PopperNathaniel PopperNathaniel Popper is a business and technology journalist who covered Wall Street and Silicon Valley for The New York Times for more than a decade and is now an editor at Bloomberg News; he is the author of the Bitcoin history Digital Gold (2015) and The Trolls of Wall Street (2024).Open the full entry, a reporter for The New York TimesThe New York TimesThe New York Times is an American morning daily newspaper published in New York City. Founded in 1851, it is published by The New York Times Company.Open the full entry, named him as a potential candidate for the man behind Bitcoin in an excerpt from his book Digital Gold; a Fortune article of May 15 relays Popper’s statement that he had heard a “quiet but widely held belief” that much of the strongest evidence pointed to “a reclusive American man of Hungarian descent named Nick Szabo.”⁠[5]

Popper met him in 2014 at a party at the home of Dan Morehead, the founder of Pantera CapitalPantera CapitalPantera Capital is an investment management firm focused on digital assets and the blockchain industry, founded by Dan Morehead in 2003. Its investments span corporate equity, early-stage tokens and liquid digital assets, and it manages a bitcoin fund, venture funds and multi-strategy blockchain funds.Open the full entry; when Popper raised the online claims that he had created Bitcoin, he became irritated and said, “I am not Satoshi,” and he repeated the denial by email when Popper asked again more than a year later. He also said, “There are a whole bunch of parallels,” and said that they look funny to him and to a lot of other people.⁠[5]

The Fortune article states that in 2014 he joined Vaurum, a Bitcoin startup in Palo Alto then in stealth mode and focused on an exchange; in Popper’s account the company was later renamed Mirror and turned toward smart contracts. A Finance Magnates article summarizing the same account states that after joining Vaurum he reoriented the company toward smart contracts and is said to have left later after becoming nervous about public exposure.⁠[5][31]

The Finance Magnates article also lists grounds given in the account: colleagues who had seen his abilities believed that he was deeply involved in Bitcoin’s development; unlike Hal Finney, Wei Dai and Adam Back, he had neither released correspondence with Satoshi from after 2009 nor acknowledged any; and after Bitcoin’s launch he was said to have adjusted his bit gold post so that it appeared to have been written after Bitcoin’s release. The article adds that he flatly denied being Satoshi Nakamoto while acknowledging the similarities between bit gold and Bitcoin, and that he was uncomfortable discussing the matter.⁠[31]

“Small-game fallacies” of May 25, 2015, argues that people applying game-theoretic or microeconomic techniques often mislead by modeling simple small games while ignoring “the games of life,” which involve reputation, moral instincts and outside incentives; it gives examples from experimental economics and from auditing with off-the-books trades, and says that security protocols have a dry layer that can be analyzed with the objective mathematics of computer science and a wet layer made up of the often unpredictable motivations of the protocols’ users. It also identifies a pure-information fallacy, the treatment of an economic institution purely as an information system: a prediction market automatically creates incentives to bring the predicted event about, and a prediction market on a person’s death is also an assassination market.⁠[32]

“The Greek financial mess; and some ways Bitcoin might help” of July 3 examines Greece’s debt problem and capital controls: ATM withdrawals limited to 60 euros a day, a ban on using credit and debit cards to pay out of the country, and private scrip with which some stores pay their suppliers. He argues that Bitcoin will not help Greeks get money out of their frozen bank accounts but can replace the emerging store scrips in the circulation among stores, suppliers and workers, and that exporters, including freelancers working over the Internet, can bring bitcoin into the country; he notes at the same time that Bitcoin is not easy to learn, either conceptually or in practice, that many Greeks will have to use the Bitcoin blockchain directly, and that similar approaches could apply to other countries with similar financial problems and controls, such as Argentina and Venezuela. An update note at the end reads: “[Update: various minor edits: the first version was rather rough, sorry :-)]”⁠[33]

“Estimating and minimizing consumer worry” of October 8 describes e-commerce as a funnel in which prospects drop out because of worries such as tedious forms, privacy and identity-theft risks, advertisements and repeated charges. He argues that payments needing no identity, such as bitcoin, can greatly reduce these worries, warns merchants against nickel-and-diming customers with pay-per-click micropayments and similar schemes, recommends long-term subscriptions for content and per-unit pricing for fungible units of consistent value, and proposes an “index of worry”: the number of lines of forms plus the number of repeated charges for content or services of variable value, with the share of screen space taken up by advertisements standing in for repeated charges where a service is paid for by advertising. He writes that he had previously called this worry-minimized commerce by a narrower label, “form-minimized commerce.”⁠[34]

“Artifacts of wealth: patterns in the evolution of collectibles and money” of July 31, 2016, presents itself as the first of at least two posts on the evolution of collectibles and money and explores the evolutionary and economic functions of “ornamental” or “ceremonial” objects such as shell beads and ceremonial blades in the archaeological record. It proposes three patterns: condensation (a typical object served many more purposes in the early Paleolithic than in the late Paleolithic), authority resemblance (new forms often borrowed authority from what they replaced through physical resemblance) and unforgeable costliness (a secure costliness in search costs, in manufacturing costs or in both); it argues that serving as symbols could not have been the primary evolutionary function of these objects, which must have had some function related to wealth and very important to Darwinian fitness, and examines shell bead traditions, cowries and early electrum coins made purposely to resemble earlier shell collectibles; before the widespread use of coinage, the post says, jewelry probably also often served a function similar to that of early coinage.⁠[35]

“Weigh and deliver: compensation and the evolution of law and money” of December 18, 2016, argues that the earliest written legal codes take the existence of commodity money for granted, the Code of Ur-Nammu requiring defendants adjudged guilty to “weigh and deliver” a specified weight of silver; it tabulates the frequency of the penalties in the Code of Ur-Nammu and in the Old Hittite laws and of the legally specified prices and rents in the Old Hittite laws, describes customary prices as a way of conserving transaction costs, traces a shift from fixed compensation to damages assessed by judges or juries, an evolution that it says coincided with the rise of coinage, and contrasts eye-for-an-eye laws with measured punishments such as whipping or prison terms.⁠[36]

“Money, blockchains, and social scalability” of February 9, 2017, argues that the value of Bitcoin lies less in computational efficiency than in social scalability, the ability of an institution to overcome human cognitive and behavioral limits so that more and more people can take part in it. Without past innovations, the post says, participation in shared human endeavors would usually be limited to about 150 people at most (it mentions the Dunbar number); trust minimization means reducing the vulnerability of participants to each other and to intermediaries and outsiders, and no institution is entirely trustless. Under headings that include “Money and Markets,” “The Social Scalability of Network Security” and “Blockchains and Cryptocurrencies,” it argues that Bitcoin’s prolific consumption of resources and poor computational scalability buy something more valuable, social scalability, so that the Bitcoin chain cannot match VisaVisaVisa Inc. is one of the world’s leaders in digital payments, with roots going back to 1958, and is headquartered in San Francisco, California.Open the full entry’s volume of transactions and small payments will be handled by peripheral payment networks such as Lightning and settled periodically on chain. Its conclusion states: “Utopian schemes are very popular in the blockchain community, but they are not viable options.”⁠[37]

“Conflict and collectibles among the Yurok” of February 23, 2017, describes the Yurok, a forager people of the lower Klamath River in CaliforniaCaliforniaCalifornia is a U.S. state on the Pacific coast; its capital is Sacramento and its largest city is Los Angeles. California was admitted to the Union on September 9, 1850, as the 31st state. Its population at the 2020 Census (April 1, 2020) was 39,538,223, the largest of any state.Open the full entry, who had no state, no officials, no chiefs and not even clan heads, and whose law was almost fully resolvable into claims for property; dentalium shells, valued by length, were in effect their money and reached them through repeated transfers from distant parts to the north, while treasures such as woodpecker scalps and large blades of obsidian or flint served in transfers of wealth for bridewealth, for compensation for injuries and for shamans’ fees. After the nutrient density of the environment, the post says, violence was probably the main barrier to what he calls social scalability among foragers.⁠[38]

“Collecting metal: the inner and outer worlds of jewelry, coins, bullion bits, and odd shiny things” of March 29, 2017, begins with the collision of two neutron stars: supernovae created metals including copper and silver, and gold came from the collision; it goes on to the ways cultures have used precious metals as jewelry, coins, treasure and money, separates bullion, the metal itself valued only for its substance, from the form given to objects, and cites Roy Sebag’s summary of the modern Asian jewelry market, “Jewelry is money,” in contrast with Western practice. Its examples include the silver rings that were used by weight to pay wergeld in Viking Iceland and the “fish-hook money,” or silver larins, used widely in the Indian Ocean trade; a picture caption at the end mentions the British Trial of the Pyx.⁠[39]

The links listed on the episode page of The Tim Ferriss Show include “Money, Blockchains, and Social Scalability” and “The Dawn of Trustworthy Computing”; at the end of the episode he pointed listeners to these two posts.⁠[7][4]

The profile page of Universidad Francisco Marroquín states that the university awarded him an honorary doctoral degree in social sciences in 2017.⁠[1]

In the interview released in June 2017 he said that the university is in Guatemala, that the honorary doctorate is in social sciences and that it came with an honorary professorship as well. He said that he had given hour-long lectures there on the origins of money, blockchains and cryptocurrency and had tried to cram too much into each hour; the point he wanted listeners to keep was that “Money is not arbitrary,” with scarcity and durability as recurring features.⁠[4]

On June 4, 2017, Tim Ferriss released episode 244 of The Tim Ferriss Show, “The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency — Nick Szabo,” co-hosted by Naval RavikantNaval RavikantNaval Ravikant is an entrepreneur and angel investor and a co-founder of AngelList. Early on he co-founded the review site Epinions; he and Babak Nivi later grew AngelList out of the startup-fundraising blog Venture Hacks, and he co-founded the cryptocurrency hedge fund MetaStable Capital and Spearhead, which backs founders to make angel investments. His views on startups and life were compiled into the book The Almanack of Naval Ravikant.Open the full entry; the transcript was published on June 1, 2018. The show notes describe him as a polymath of unusually broad and deep interests and knowledge, a computer scientist, legal scholar and cryptographer best known for pioneering research in digital contracts and cryptocurrency, and state that he designed Bit Gold, which many consider a precursor of Bitcoin.⁠[7][4]

Naval Ravikant said on the show that the two had come to know each other through Twitter: he stumbled across the blog Unenumerated while researching cryptocurrency and then got into short exchanges with Szabo on Twitter, which he described as bite-sized, 160-character conversations.⁠[4]

The topics listed in the show notes run, in order, from what cryptocurrency is and where his interest began through cryptography, blockchains, a brief history of currency and what makes money valuable, smart contracts and multi-signature transactions, ICOs, common misconceptions about cryptocurrency, what makes Bitcoin unique, the innovation of BitGold, proof of work and Bitcoin mining, computational inefficiency and social scalability, whether a government could regulate cryptocurrencies out of existence, how people accidentally lose bitcoins, the pros and cons of Ethereum compared with Bitcoin, the cultural disconnect between traditional finance and cryptocurrency, the traits of charlatans, forks, the problems users face with traditional banking and transaction privacy, to his favorite books, the high school class he would teach and what he plans to write about.⁠[7]

On the show he said that cryptocurrency matters to him for partly political reasons, as a way to gain more independence in one’s life from institutions. He called what Satoshi did a really big innovation and described Satoshi as some unknown character, or group, who has disappeared; the block size, he said, is a technical security parameter whose job is to be a fence that prevents people from flooding the network with transactions.⁠[4]

Of Ethereum he said that it is at a riskier stage but also has much greater potential; he said “I am excited about Ethereum and Ethereum Classic” and mentioned a sidechain for Bitcoin called Rootstock.⁠[4]

Asked what he would put on a billboard, he answered “trusted third parties are security holes,” the key point he wants people working on blockchains to remember; he also said on the show that a great surplus of hardware capacity has been accumulated and is only starting to be used. For technical people who want to understand it, he said, the Bitcoin white paper is still by far the best place to start, along with Vitalik ButerinVitalik ButerinVitalik Buterin is the originator of Ethereum, the author of its whitepaper, and one of its eight co-founders, as well as a co-founder of Bitcoin Magazine. The Ethereum Foundation calls him the inventor of Ethereum; he has long been involved in protocol research and public discussion, but does not control the network as a CEO.Open the full entry’s Ethereum white paper; of traditional finance and blockchains he said that the thing to do is to “marry them together.”⁠[4][7]

He said that he worries that privacy is going in the wrong direction, borrowing a coinage, creepularity, whose author he said he had forgotten, for the way life grows creepier as strangers look into personal lives; he takes some precautions himself, he said, but many of them are security through obscurity, so he cannot talk about them.⁠[4][7]

The favorite books he named are Alfred Crosby’s The Columbian Exchange, Richard DawkinsRichard DawkinsRichard Dawkins is a British evolutionary biologist and science writer whose 1976 book The Selfish Gene set out a gene-centred view of evolution and coined the word meme; he was the first Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford from 1995 to 2008 and, through books such as The God Delusion, became a prominent advocate of atheism.Open the full entry’s The Selfish Gene, which he puts on his list of books everybody should read, and Matt Ridley’s books on social and genetic evolution; he said that he reads a great deal of economic and legal history, that his smartest teachers are now mostly self-taught people on Twitter and blogs, and that he no longer feels guilty about time spent on the Internet.⁠[4][7]

He said that he writes partly because it is what he wants to do in life and that he values freedom of thought over thinking what a boss wants him to think; he added that he has unfinished thoughts on the Industrial Revolution and on what he calls the exploration explosion after Columbus, but is so busy that he will probably never write them up.⁠[4][7]

The New Media site of Universidad Francisco Marroquín has a page titled “Nick Szabo – What You Need to Know About Smart Contracts and Cryptocurrency,” dated January 31, 2018, which presents a conversation between Gabriel Delgado Ayau and him. The page’s description says that he begins with how he became interested in cryptocurrency and later developed his research on smart contracts, which he hopes will gain relevance in the coming years, and goes on to whether this technology will be decisive in protecting people’s rights and information, the origins and development of money, mining and its relation to Bitcoin, where the price of Bitcoin is heading and what he is most excited about for the future.⁠[40]

On March 23, 2018, he published the blog post “The many traditions of non-governmental money (part i),” a response to the statement that “traditionally, currency is produced by a nation’s government” in educational material on Bitcoin that the Federal ReserveFederal Reserve SystemThe Federal Reserve System is the central bank of the United States. Created by the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, it consists of the Board of Governors in Washington, D.C., twelve regional Federal Reserve Banks and the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC).Open the full entry had put out for teachers and students. He argued that the statement is at the very least quite incomplete and opened a two-part series going back in time through examples of non-governmental money; the first part covers privately issued IOUs (bank notes) and privately minted coins, with examples from Scotland, Hong Kong, Sweden, England, Canada, the United StatesUnited StatesThe United States is a federal country in North America made up of 50 states, the District of Columbia as the seat of government, and territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam; its capital is Washington, D.C. The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted a resident population of 331,449,281, and the 435 seats of the House of Representatives are apportioned among the states on the basis of the census.Open the full entry and China among other places, and compares the higher layers of Bitcoin, such as exchanges and Lightning, to checking accounts and private bank notes: in each a more efficient medium is substituted for a less efficient one at the cost of more trust and thus of greater vulnerability and risk in the system.⁠[41]

The Blockworks article notes that his blog has had no new posts since March 2018.⁠[10]

JAN3’s article states that at the 2024 Plan ₿ Forum in Lugano he gave a presentation on the historical evolution of international trade and payments, emphasizing that ancient trade relied on non-sovereign, globally recognized forms of money such as gold and silver and arguing that Bitcoin is a modern equivalent of these ancient technologies, offering the same trust minimization while adding global transferability and speed.⁠[6]

A Cointelegraph article of October 8, 2024, states that a new HBO documentary claiming to have identified Satoshi Nakamoto was to air that day and that some regarded the claim as possible marketing; on the prediction market PolymarketPolymarketPolymarket is a prediction market platform founded by Shayne Coplan in 2020, on which users buy and sell shares in the outcomes of political, sports, financial, cultural, and other events, with trading prices regarded as the market’s estimate of the probability that an event will occur. It rose to prominence during the 2024 US election, returned to the US market in 2025 by acquiring a licensed exchange and clearinghouse, and received a major investment from Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, while facing gambling-regulation and insider-trading scrutiny in US states and several countries.Open the full entry the odds of his being named as Satoshi had taken a commanding lead, in double digits, with every other named contender in single digits, Len Sassaman having been an early front-runner. An update note added to the article says that Peter Todd was said to have been named in the documentary.⁠[2]

The article sets out the case made for him: bit gold resembles Bitcoin in concept, and he had a decade, from 1998 to 2008, in which to refine it; his other work in the field shows technical ability; Dominic Frisby, in the book Bitcoin: The Future of Money?, argues that he and Satoshi write alike and that both cited the economist Carl Menger; and he is as intensely private as Satoshi. He has consistently denied being Satoshi, the article states.⁠[2]

The same article describes bit gold as an entirely digital currency without intermediaries that used proof of work against double-spending but relied on a quorum of addresses and not on computing power, which left it open to Sybil attacks; the article calls it a proposed but never-realized cryptocurrency.⁠[2]

On January 9, 2025, Samson Mow, the founder and head of JAN3, announced in an article on the company’s website that he was joining as chief scientist, and Cointelegraph carried the news the same day; JAN3’s press release is dated January 11, with the dateline Bitcoin City, El Salvador.⁠[6][42][43]

JAN3 wrote that he would lead the company’s research, studying Bitcoin’s implications for monetary policy, international trade and financial sovereignty, and would publish in-depth analyses; the company hoped that his expertise would help it develop strategies for engaging nation-states on integrating Bitcoin into their financial systems and holding it as a reserve asset, and it planned to build tooling to help states do so.⁠[6][43]

The press release and the Cointelegraph article relay his statement that he was joining to help Bitcoin become the “cornerstone of an entirely new global financial system”; a focus on decentralization and trust minimization, he said, can address the systemic inefficiencies of legacy systems. Samson Mow said that he had known him for nearly 10 years and that the company was proud to have him join.⁠[43][42][6]

JAN3’s article quotes him to the effect that the businesses that have developed treasury and accounting expertise with Bitcoin in international trade are all crypto-focused companies for now, but that they are paving the way for Bitcoin to enter larger and more traditional systems of trade.⁠[6]

In the press release JAN3 describes itself as a digital infrastructure company devoted to widening access to Bitcoin technology, founded and led by Samson Mow, whose mission is to accelerate what it calls hyperbitcoinization by providing tools for individuals, autonomous regions and sovereign nations.⁠[43]

A Cointelegraph article of September 29, 2025, states that he returned to X after a hiatus of almost five years with a flurry of posts on Sunday, September 28; on the same day the Bitcoin Core project announced v30.0rc2, the second test version of v30.0, which, the article says, was expected to be deployed around late October, the exact date remaining flexible.⁠[44]

In his posts he said that network fees protect miners but do not deter spam enough to protect full nodes; raising the OP_RETURN allowance, he argued, would probably make the problem worse and would also increase legal risks, and whether operators of full nodes can be held responsible for harmful data stored on the chain is an open legal issue almost everywhere. He also gave considerations pointing the other way: OP_RETURN data can be pruned, so that allowing more of it might reduce legal risk, while illegal content in a standard format is more likely to impress lawyers, judges and jurors and is therefore legally riskier than hidden or fragmented data.⁠[44]

On the change itself, the Cointelegraph article of September 29 states that the default cap of 80 bytes on OP_RETURN was removed, leaving it effectively unlimited at up to nearly 4 megabytes per transaction output; the article of October 13 states that the data limit rose from 80 bytes to 100,000 bytes.⁠[44][45]

The Cointelegraph article of October 13 states that he advised node operators to run Bitcoin Knots: “As a (hopefully) temporary measure, run Knots. I strongly recommend not upgrading to Core v30.” The article adds that on October 2 he posted on X about the legal position of node operators hosting illegal data, arguing that without added safeguards allowing operators of archival nodes to delete illegal content non-disruptively, those operators will often be held criminally liable.⁠[45]

The same article states that Bitcoin Core v30 had been officially released to a mixed reaction from the community; BitRef data quoted in it showed 5,114 Knots nodes at the time, 21.48 percent of all Bitcoin nodes.⁠[45]

The Finance Magnates article of May 18, 2015, summarizing the account in The New York Times, gives his age as 51 and describes him as American-born.⁠[31]

The “About Me” box in the sidebar of his blog carries the name Nick Szabo and consists of comments by others, among them Adam Shostack’s “A premier thinker about history, law and economics, and the lessons they have for security,” together with remarks by Brian Dunbar, Sean McGrath and Richard Hollerith.⁠[11]

JAN3’s press release and the article on JAN3’s website both call “Shelling Out: The Origins of Money” his seminal work, the article adding that it explores the historical evolution of money and its relevance to digital currencies; in his blog post of July 2016 he linked to this earlier essay and quoted from it: “[C]ollectibles provided a fundamental improvement to the workings of reciprocal altruism.” To describe his solution to the puzzles of what collectibles were for, he wrote there, future posts would set out updated versions of the theories laid out in that essay.⁠[43][6][35]

Personal website: https://unenumerated.blogspot.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[11][7]

X: Public account: https://x.com/NickSzabo4 (opens in a new window).⁠[29][7]

JAN3: Official website: https://jan3.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[43]