Nick Szabo

If anyone is worth their salt in Bitcoin, they'll know that trusted third parties are security holes.

If they've read anything from Nick Szabo or just been in the space for long enough, they would know that notionally, we don't trust, we verify.

Not always the case.

Some people, I think in recent years, we've kind of developed a culture of well that person said it and that person said it said trust me bro but uh I think we can rethink all these but the point that I'm trying to make is Bitcoin is fundamentally about removing trusted third parties it's literally in the white paper so guard block introduces another participant into this custody arrangement um how are you reconciling those two things and Why is collaborative custody or rather collaborative security, I think in this case, because the custody is kind of shared, so it's different.

But the modern crypto industry didn't actually come up with this idea.

Computer scientist Nick Szabo coined the term in 1994.

In his words, a smart contract is, quote, a computerized transaction protocol that executes the terms of contract.

And the example Sabo referred to as a primitive ancestor of the whole concept was the humble vending machine.

The important idea here is that the rules are visible, they apply to everyone equally, and they're enforced without anyone needing to approve them.

And unlike most agreements with a middleman, you can read every line before you sign up.

Nick Szabo described smart contracts as a way to take the middleman out of everyday agreements.

30 years later, we have exactly that, and hundreds of billions of dollars rely on that tech.

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C-Y-P-H-E-R-P-U-N-K-S Writecode, Nick Sabo, Smart Contracts, and Bitgold Nick Sabo is a remarkable cypherpunk, known for his smart contracts and Bitgold.

Let's find out more about this crypto pioneer.

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One, they're probably reselling your information, but two, third, trusted third parties are security holes.

That's what Nick Szabo wrote.

And the reality is, you know, does every website you go to on the internet really need to possess a copy of your information? I think not.

And that's a big, Security surface, vulnerability surface.

Nobody could even say for sure whether Satoshi was a man, a woman or... a group of people and then towards the end of 2010 satoshi started becoming less active on the 12th of december 2010 chatoshi made their last known public post on a bitcoin forum it was just a normal message about improving the software there was nothing to suggest that they were about to disappear but satoshi continued speaking privately with a few developers in april 2011 satoshi sent an email to a computer programmer called mike hearn in that email satoshi said that they had moved on to other things and that bitcoin was now in good hands a few days later on the 26th of april satoshi sent another email to a different developer called gavin anderson and that is the last widely accepted communication from satoshi nakamoto after that nothing and here's where the story gets even more interesting right you see in the early days of bitcoin satoshi is believed to have collected a huge amount of it some researchers estimates that satoshi may have owned around 1.1 million bitcoins now that figure has never been properly confirmed but if it is accurate we're talking about a fortune worth tens of billions of dollars at today's prices and most of the bitcoin linked to satoshi's early mining activity appears to have remained untouched nobody is spending it so naturally people started asking questions Who was this person? Why would somebody create something so valuable and then just walk away from it? And where on earth did they go? Over the years, several people have been suspected of being Satoshi Nakamoto.

Names like Hal Feeney, Nick Szabo, Dorian Nakamoto, Wright.

They've all come up, okay? Craig Wright even claimed that he was Satoshi.

But in 2024, a British court ruled that he was lying.

Just

like almost had Nick Szabo a couple of times on the podcast.

Yeah, I would not.

Dude, Nick Szabo, I could care less if he ever came to TabGonf.

Why not? Because he is such an asshole sometimes.

We all are sometimes.

Nice guy.

I like you.

Mm-hmm.

And the other half of the class, there was, like, basically consensus that it was either Hal Finney, Len Sassaman, Nick Szabo, or some combination of those three.

So I had them do a little debate, like support your reasoning.

Mm-hmm.

Nope.

And Nick Szabo says money is the trust-minimized asset.

So let's disentangle this.

What is the relationship of money and trust?

Now, this may sound naive now because of course they didn't, but keep in mind, Satoshi is anonymous, and there's a reason for that, because everybody knew.

All the smart people knew back then, right? Guys like Nick Szabo, whether or not he's Satoshi, he's apparently [chuckles] concerned about that kind of thing, right? The entire community was certain that they were gonna try to ban Bitcoin, and I think one of the most amazing things about Bitcoin is that they didn't.

I think a lot of them wanted to, but government, it's evil, but it's also extremely stupid, and so they never got the horses' asses in line to actually do anything about Bitcoin.

So, you know, here we are, [chuckles] you know, what, uh, we're 13? No, 18 years in, right? And they still...