Nick Szabo

Nick Szabo is an American computer scientist and legal scholar famous for his work in cryptography, digital contracts, cryptocurrencies, and inventing the concept of smart contracts. He attended the University of Washington, and graduated with a computer science & engineering degree. He would later go on to hold an honorary professorship at the Universidad Francisco Marroquin.

Nick Szabo created the predecessor to Bitcoin with similar advanced math and cryptography algorithms to Bitcoin called bit gold.

He published the BitGold proposal in 1998, a decade before Satoshi Nakamoto released the paper on Bitcoin.

Some people believe that Nick Szabo played a crucial role in the development of Bitcoin, even going so far as to claim that he is Satoshi Nakamoto the creator of Bitcoin, although Szabo denies that he is Satoshi. Szabo made the following statement regarding accusation of him being Satoshi Nakamoto:

I will say this, in the hope of setting the record straight: I’m not Satoshi, and I’m not a college professor. In fact, I never was a college professor.