Nick Szabo
Nick Szabo, a computer scientist and legal scholar, writes about digital money, smart contracts, and the history of institutions.
What HN says
HN commenters recommend his essays and blog, and link them in discussions of Bitcoin's origins and whether Satoshi drew on his work.
Stats for nerds
123HN people shared it
79linked in comments
681story points
Mar 2025last shared
Top posts on HN
- 1Bit gold (2005)1 person · 107 points · first shared 2013 · 88 comments on HN
- 2Why the Internet is creating more value than jobs1 person · 87 points · first shared 2011 · 20 comments on HN
- 3Pascal's Scams (2012)4 people · 70 points · first shared 2012 · 57 comments on HN
- 4Money, blockchains, and social scalability9 people · 39 points · first shared 2017 · 2 comments on HN
- 5How to succeed or fail on a frontier1 person · 38 points · first shared 2009 · 16 comments on HN
- 6How to succeed or fail on a frontier (2006)3 people · 36 points · first shared 2009 · 5 comments on HN
- 7Bitcoin, what took ye so long? (2011)2 people · 35 points · first shared 2013 · 2 comments on HN
- 8The Dawn of Trustworthy Computing2 people · 31 points · first shared 2014 · 1 comments on HN
- 9Nick Szabo: "The Singularity" is an incoherent and religious idea1 person · 31 points · first shared 2011 · 49 comments on HN
- 10Collecting Metal2 people · 30 points · first shared 2017 · 2 comments on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
- ftlioFeb 2017
This stratfor article discusses the natural capital afforded to the US:
https://www.stratfor.com/analysis/geopolitics-united-states-part-1-inevitable-empire both in terms of transportation networks and being removed by an ocean from the costly power struggles of Europe (which I'll add can be seen in the numbers of casualties for Americans in the first and second world war relative to our European counterparts and realized gains from those wars).There is also an interesting observation by Nick Szabo about the value of a transportation network: '
Combine this with Metcalfe's Law and we reach a dramatic but solid mathematical conclusion: the potential value of a land transportation network is the inverse fourth power of the cost of that transportation. A reduction in transportation costs in a trade network by a factor of two increases the potential value of that network by a factor of sixteen.'http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2014/10/transportation-divergence-and.html?m=1
So yes, the actual land we occupy is worth booku bucks.
- psycNov 2017
The government has more than enough power to prevent banks and investment firms from getting involved, which could significantly limit the pace of future growth in cryptoasset prices.
In the big picture, a tension between mathematics and the law has always been near the heart of the history of cryptanarchy and cryptocurrencies. Sometimes-Satoshi-candidate Nick Szabo has written extensively on this for ages [0]. I'd summarize it like this: 1) The Constitution cannot ultimately protect the legality of any crypto-related activity against a motivated governement. 2) The government cannot ultimately stop P2P crypto-architectures from functioning, although illegally, short of shutting down the Internet.
[0] http://unenumerated.blogspot.com
- macroexchangeSep 2017
Szabo reposted this blog post [1] on December 27, 2008
The Bitcoin genesis block was created Jan 4, 2009 [2]
At that time there was about say 3 people in the world interested in these ideas. Make your judgement and consider the probabilities for P(Szabo = Satoshi) and P(Szabo != Satoshi).
I think if you read up on all the articles and convince yourself. In [3] Szabo said there is a lot similarities with Bitcoin and Bitgold, and he talked about the differences in interviews.
[1] http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2005/12/bit-gold.html
[2] https://blockexplorer.com/block/000000000019d6689c085ae165831e934ff763ae46a2a6c172b3f1b60a8ce26f
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_yUeuKu7L4 - sielskrJul 2009
To what extent will a government go to protect your investment/property?
My guess is that it is better for a business to be under a common-law jurisdiction. The legal system in most of the world is of a type called civil law, as contrasted to common law, but common law tends to protect property better because property is more central to its conceptual framework. Nick Szabo argues convincingly for the superiority of common law over civil law on his blog, http://unenumerated.blogspot.com.
One of Dubai's economic zones uses common law. (They hired a retired English judge to run the legal system in the zone.) added. Bermuda and the Cayman Islands use common law, too.
- hansletJun 2019
Crypto in this case does mean cryptographic currency, and it is indeed part of an Cypherpunks wet dream, which is a movement since the 80s to 90s[0][1], and Bitcoin was largely enabled by people of this movement[2][3]. They basically strive to build society with cryptographic methods.
Cyberpunk on the other hand is just a science-fiction genre, which mostly play in futuristic orwellian dystopias and people like to draw comparisons to them.
[0] https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/crypto-anarchy.html
[1] https://www.chaum.com/ecash/
[2] http://www.weidai.com/bmoney.txt
[3] http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2005/12/bit-gold.html - daicsJan 2018
UMG, Warner, Sony and Spotify cannot share bills for running a common database on AWS today without creating yet another corporation and relinquishing power over the data to it.
Blockchains are not the next big thing in databases. They are here to revolutionize how existing organizations co-ordinate, enter into contracts with each other, and even allow individuals themselves co-ordinate directly with each other without intermediaries through novel org structures.
You are trading computational scalability for social scalability.
http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2017/02/money-blockchains-and-social-scalability.html