Nick Szabo

Nicholas Szabo is a computer scientist, legal scholar, and cryptographer known for his research in digital contracts and digital currency. He graduated from the University of Washington in 1989 with a 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.

The phrase and concept of "smart contracts" 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. At one time Szabo was a proponent of "extropian" life extension techniques.