Nick Szabo

Nick Szabo, who is possibly Satoshi Nakamoto (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Szabo) has many worthwhile papers here: http://szabo.best.vwh.net/ Including "Formalizing and Securing Relationships on Public Networks" and "A Formal Language for Analyzing Contracts". All of his essays are extremely well written and interesting.

By the way I recommend the essays by Szabo: http://szabo.best.vwh.net/ ! Also his blog: http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/

Please read carefully what Nick was interested in: http://szabo.best.vwh.net Theory of property, origins of money, methods of protecting rights, origins of joint-stock companies. Almost every article is a motivation for building Bitcoin. And Nick is not just some economist, he is a capable programmer with knowledge in cryptography too. Do you know anyone else who could understand all these long-term aspects of Bitcoin and could carefully build a practical system over two years which most of the economists and most of the engineers would immediately dismiss for tons of "shortcomings"? If it's not Szabo, it's someone who is very much like him.

I was recently (Thanksgiving) discussing this with the owner of a small tech company. Our consensus was that if Satoshi was not Szabo, Satoshi at least read Szabo's works. The article doesn't spend as much time on the similarity of Szabo's ideas to those of the Bitcoin whitepaper, but I encourage anyone who is interested in this topic to read some of Szabo's stuff. His website, http://szabo.best.vwh.net/ is currently experiencing capacity issues, so here's a cache link: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://szabo.best… Additionally, his blogspot: http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/

I don't know about "stylometry", but textual analysis is definitely a field that is grounded in statistics and probability. And here's an excellent textual analysis of Satoshi's writing -- really quite convincing: https://likeinamirror.wordpress.com/2013/12/01/satoshi-nakamoto-is-pro… The verdict? Nick Szabo, a professor of computer science at GWU and trained attorney, with significant expertise in the digital economy and smart contracts. He's got a fascinating blog at: http://szabo.best.vwh.net/ To be honest, I was convinced by this particular analysis back in December, but I haven't been passing it around because I respected Satoshi's desire for anonymity. However, now that an innocent man is being hounded and harassed, I think it's about time that the creator step up and claim his creation. We also need to know what happened to the Satoshi stash for this amazing project to move forward with greater certainty. So I would encourage the real Satoshi to step up. I'm not at all convinced that Dorian Nakamoto -- albeit a pretty fascinating man -- is actually the creator of Bitcoin.

1) Read the original blockchain article: http://szabo.best.vwh.net/securetitle.html 2) Longest lecture Nick Szabo, inventor of blockchains, ever gave was in the money museum in Zurich: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWuN2R2DC6c 3) Study the original source code (bitcoin version 0.0.1). 4) https://github.com/bitcoinbook/bitcoinbook

> I'd love to see an example of such a restricted contract language. A Formal Language for Analyzing Contracts, http://szabo.best.vwh.net/contractlanguage.html Composing contracts: an adventure in nancial engineering, https://lexifi.com/files/resources/MLFiPaper.pdf

You might enjoy Nick Szabo's work on the subject: http://szabo.best.vwh.net/shell.html

What makes you think money didn't exist before the state? http://szabo.best.vwh.net/shell.html

Fascinating. Currently reading this one: http://szabo.best.vwh.net/securetitle.html "Secure Property Titles with Owner Authority".

I'm increasingly of the mind that: 1. Advertising is the problem. It's creating technical problems. It's creating UI/UX problems. It's creating gobs of crap content. It's creating massive privacy intrusions and security risks. And for what? Buzzfeed? 2. Ultimately, the problem is the business model for compensating informational goods. Absent some alternative mechanism (broadband tax, federal income tax applied to creative works), I don't see this changing much. https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/search?q=broadband+tax&restri… 3. Micropayments aren't the solution. http://szabo.best.vwh.net/micropayments.html

Nick Szabo is the person peoples most think programmed bitcoin. 20 years ago he developed smart contracts, which is basically programmable money that uses law as the analogue for its implementation. This is because this is essentially what is happening the mergence of software, programming, money, law, economics. http://szabo.best.vwh.net/shell.html http://szabo.best.vwh.net/smart_contracts_idea.html The current leading implementation is "ethereum"

Simple explanation by quoting Nick Szabo: "Smart contracts go beyond the vending machine in proposing to embed contracts in all sorts of property that is valuable and controlled by digital means." http://szabo.best.vwh.net/smart_contracts_idea.html

You probably already know about "Secure Property Titles With Owner Authority", but other people might not: http://szabo.best.vwh.net/securetitle.html I think Satoshi must have read all of Szabo's work! Long before the Bitcoin paper, Szabo argues that technology can supplant existing bureaucratic means of recording claims to property rights (but he notes that it doesn't directly supplant existing institutions for enforcing those rights, or beliefs about how the rights are acquired or transferred). I thought of this piece when reading this week's xkcd what-if: https://what-if.xkcd.com/111/ ("[...] you could edit all the property records on Earth to say that you own all the land and edit all the banking records to say you own all the money. But everyone else would disagree with those records, and they would edit them back or ignore them [...]")

I like this quote from Nick in 1999 (http://szabo.best.vwh.net/intrapoly.html - linked from TFA as "obscure"): > spammers may be able to defeat compute-cost postage by using custom chips optimized for computing the particular puzzle function. This presaged the ASIC miners that so quickly came to dominate Bitcoin. It's almost wonder that new types of coins are being mined without (semi) custom chips at all; perhaps only because FPGA development tools have improved much slower than software in general.

Nemo_: sorry for the relatively poor level of discourse in this thread. Few people without a working knowledge of basic cryptography seem to understand that Bitcoin is, in a mathematical (i.e., true) sense, as indestructible as the hashing and signing algorithms it relies on to maintain integrity. Exchange markets like MtGox and online wallet-storage services like InstaWallet might be hacked and fail, but not Bitcoin (at least not without major mathematical advances that would render the entire Web insecure as a byproduct). PS. You will enjoy reading this post on the origins of money, in which among other things the author analyzes the common properties of many commodities used as money throughout history -- including not just gold and silver but less-well-known materials like wampun shells, ivory beads, and ostrich egg shells: http://szabo.best.vwh.net/shell.html

here is some actual scholarship on the subject rather than opinionated garbage in the original link. http://szabo.best.vwh.net/synch.html

A related paper by Nick Szabo: "A Formal Language for Analyzing Contracts" http://szabo.best.vwh.net/contractlanguage.html Szabo's various other related papers: http://szabo.best.vwh.net/index.html and his blog at http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/

After a while it's pretty easy to see past the boilerplate. Has anyone ever made the analogy literal by creating a language that 1) describes contracts (like this: http://szabo.best.vwh.net/contractlanguage.html), and 2) a compiler that turns it into something you could upload to the SEC, print and sign, or whatever?

Lots of people are working on declarative contracts. Here's an overview.[1] That paper has a set of desirable properties for a contract language, and analyzes some of the existing ones against those properties. Here's a contract language from 2002.[2] The author expresses various common contracts, and some not so common, in it. This is reasonably readable. If you like logic formalism, there's this.[3] Financial companies would like to have their contracts, especially derivatives, in a form suitable for running risk analyses and various scenarios. You'd like to be able to form queries like "Suppose X misses their payments for the next quarter? What does that trigger?" Some of the 2008 financial debacle came from the inability to ask questions like that. [1] https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/A-Survey-of-Formal-Languages-for… [2] http://szabo.best.vwh.net/contractlanguage.html [3] http://www.cse.chalmers.se/~gersch/slides-talks/slides-CL-ModelCheckin…

More here: http://szabo.best.vwh.net/synch.html

I think what a lot of the posts on this thread are missing is that Beats is not really a headphone company, it's a jewelry company. And jewelry doesn't need to be made of anything special, it just needs to be rare [0]. The prohibitive cost of Beats is its selling point. Nick Szabo's essay on money Shelling Out - The Origins of Money [1] points out how Wampum in its various forms was worn to signify wealth. Ornamental swords and axes with no utility were flashed around as well. This is nothing new - what's interesting is that we're beginning to see consumer technology take the place of beads, fabrics, stones and metal. [0] Using wampum as an example again – the materials themselves were common however energy was required to collect shells/teeth/furs etc – energy that could otherwise be used to collect food, repair huts, make clothing etc. Money abstracts this cost, but it's still there effectively [1] http://szabo.best.vwh.net/shell.html

I posted this because it is an interesting view, and it was written in 1913 and so a lot the ideas here got picked up and included in ideas of economics since then. But I do have some major disagreements with the author: "Credit and debt have nothing and never have had anything to do with gold and silver." The history goes that originally humans used things like shells and beads to signal debts and obligations ( http://szabo.best.vwh.net/shell.html ). The idea is you need to have some collectible that is very hard to produce or fake, otherwise someone could forge it and fake that you owed them a debt. Overtime, it turns out gold and silver make the best tokens, because they are rare, easily molded into tokens of various size, and are very hard to fake. Then the government makes coins out of these gold and silver, and tries to make the coins the official tender, and sets the value of the coins at premium over the bullion included. Finally, the government tries to debase the coins gradually so it can make money from seinorage. "Such legislation was, no doubt, due to the erroneous view that has grown up in modern days that a depositor has the right to have his deposit paid in gold or in “lawful money.” I am not aware of any law expressly giving him such a right, and under normal conditions, at any rate, he would not have it" It would have been news to the depositors that they did not have the right to withdraw the money they put in. If they were not given this right, would…

http://szabo.best.vwh.net/jointstock.html "The modern joint-stock corporation has many sources in medieval Europe. First among these was corporate law itself. Although the era is commonly referred to as "feudalism," for the hierarchy of individually owned "fiefs" of land and control of serfs as fixtures of that land, large amounts of wealth in Europe were actually controlled by corporate entities. Chief among these were church lands, the corporate entities being dioceses, religious orders and the Roman Church itself. These entities controlled a substantial fraction of the land in Western Europe. Furthermore cities (with varying degrees of political independence), merchant guilds, craft guilds, and many charitable entities (such as hospitals) were legal "corporations," i.e. artificial and perpetual legal persons under law. Some basic issues in corporate law (for example, when are officers individually liable for acts of the corporation, and when the corporation is liable for acts of its agents) had already been solved in canon law and urban law long before the joint-stock corporation." and more on the "Origins of the Joint-Stock Company"

In implying the penny gap can be eliminated, this article fails to account for mental transaction costs. No matter how simple a microbilling service is, there is still a mental transaction cost for deciding whether to pay or not. If my time is worth $20/hour (US average wage), and it takes me 3 seconds to read your microbilling screen and understand what you are charging, it has already cost me a penny. 3 seconds is enough time for the average reader to read 5 words. I would estimate you have about a minute to explain your service and charge for it, if you want the customer to spend a quarter on something that is worth fifty cents (or more) to them. (See http://szabo.best.vwh.net/micropayments.html or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micropayment#Theory.2Fcriticism for more background on mental transaction costs.) If the price of your freemium service is artificially high, then you are doing it wrong. The freemium model is for services where the price of supporting free users is less than the price of other ways of informing your paying customers that you exist. (Including cases where free users contribute value.) The best way to structure the freemium model is such that you only charge for things that are natural scarcities, not things that can be freely replicated. For example, charging for support (human time to solve your problem) is better than charging for features. (Existing features aren't scarce, it costs nothing to roll them out to all users. Implementing new…

Sure, no problem. As you can see I didn't dig deep in other instruments, though there are a lot of interesting things (selling puts for banks, corporate bonds, buying VIX), but they require due diligence as well, you just need to dig deep and read everything that you can find about them. This is the video series I was writing about: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLE88E9ICdipidHkTehs1VbFzgwrq1jkU… Mike Maloney most important part of the film about investing in silver: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAAIwef3dOg Why you should invest in Bitcoin (Tuur Demester, 2013): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7LQu-eIOO0 Bitcoin Whitepaper: http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf Origins of money (by Nick Szabo): http://szabo.best.vwh.net/shell.html http://szabo.best.vwh.net/index.html Also if you decide to invest into Bitcoin, the most important things are: - Buy only what you can hold for at least 5 years (and expect the 95% downturns) - Use a hardware wallet (I prefer https://trezor.io/ , Ledger is probably OK as well, but the source code is really ugly, and it has a trusted module that I don't trust). - Don't buy alt coins, or if you do, make sure that you read the source code, look at the test coverage, read cryptography books to understand their cryptography, see how many bugs they have, make sure that you are really able to run a full node that synchronizes from the genesis block, if it has smart contracts, see if the smart contracts have integration tests as well, look at…

1. You just make an agreement with someone who would like to buy your tokens for some national currency. If you ever played an MMORPG or Diablo 2 or something, you know that "imaginary" digital items can be traded for "real" money. There are many exchanges where you can do this conveniently. 2. For one example, consider how tedious it is to open a new bank account; with cryptocurrency, you just make a new keypair. Smart contracts improve on normal contracts in that they are executed automatically and cheaply. One of the first theoreticians of smart contracts wrote: "A canonical real-life example, which we might consider to be the primitive ancestor of smart contracts, is the humble vending machine. Within a limited amount of potential loss (the amount in the till should be less than the cost of breaching the mechanism), the machine takes in coins, and via a simple mechanism, which makes a freshman computer science problem in design with finite automata, dispense change and product according to the displayed price. The vending machine is a contract with bearer: anybody with coins can participate in an exchange with the vendor. The lockbox and other security mechanisms protect the stored coins and contents from attackers, sufficiently to allow profitable deployment of vending machines in a wide variety of areas. Smart contracts go beyond the vending machine in proposing to embed contracts in all sorts of property that is valuable and controlled by digital…

The author, self admittedly being a little late to cryptocurrencies, kind of buried the lead here: cryptocurrencies and cryptocontracts aren't twin technologies; the ability to create and enforce contracts is built into the Bitcoin protocol. A lot of that functionality is currently dormant, (remember, the reference Bitcoin-Qt client is still hasn't reached version 1.0) it's likely to get enabled once other issues within Bitcoin are resolved. Also, there's been a lot of thought put into these concepts already: Mike Hearn's talk at the Bitcoin 2012 London conference (https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=mD4L7xDNCm… on Contracts, Smart property, etc. Bitcoin wiki entries on Contracts (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Contracts), Smart property (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Smart_Property) and Agents (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Agents) Nick Szabo's seminal paper Formalizing and Securing Relationships on Public Networks (http://szabo.best.vwh.net/formalize.html) Ripple Labs (https://ripple.com/wiki/User:Justmoon/Contracts:_Overview) is working on contracts too.