Nick Szabo
unenumerated.blogspot.com · Personal blog · on HN since 2007
Nick Szabo, a computer scientist and legal scholar, writes about digital money, smart contracts, and the history of institutions.
What HN saysHN commenters recommend his essays and blog, and link them in discussions of Bitcoin's origins and whether Satoshi drew on his work.
123HN people shared it
56linked it in comments
79stories submitted
681story points
7 months agolast shared
2007people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Bit Gold (2008)13 people · 5 points · first shared 2008 · 7 comments on HN
- 2Some hard things are easy when explained well12 people · 1 points · first shared 2008 · discussion on HN
- 3Bitcoin, what took ye so long?11 people · 9 points · first shared 2011 · 1 comments on HN
- 4Money, blockchains, and social scalability9 people · 39 points · first shared 2017 · 2 comments on HN
- 5The many traditions of non-governmental money (2018)8 people · 10 points · first shared 2018 · 1 comments on HN
- 6Bit gold markets5 people · first shared 2008
- 7Pascal's Scams (2012)4 people · 70 points · first shared 2012 · 57 comments on HN
- 8Conflict and collectibles among the Yurok4 people · 16 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
- 9How to succeed or fail on a frontier (2006)3 people · 36 points · first shared 2009 · 5 comments on HN
- 10The Irreducible Complexity of Society (2006)3 people · 2 points · first shared 2014 · 1 comments on HN
- 11Bitcoin, what took ye so long? (2011)2 people · 35 points · first shared 2013 · 2 comments on HN
- 12The Dawn of Trustworthy Computing2 people · 31 points · first shared 2014 · 1 comments on HN
- 13Collecting Metal2 people · 30 points · first shared 2017 · 2 comments on HN
- 14Wet Code and Dry (2008)2 people · 15 points · first shared 2016 · 1 comments on HN
- 15Transportation, divergence, and the industrial revolution2 people · 5 points · first shared 2014 · discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
11001100 · 2020-11-26
Crypto-Current: Bitcoin and Philosophy (2018)
https://etscrivner.github.io/cryptocurrent/
and the Twitter account of Nick Szabo is great: https://twitter.com/NickSzabo4 (his blog: https://unenumerated.blogspot.com/)
zby · 2015-05-15
By the way I recommend the essays by Szabo: http://szabo.best.vwh.net/ !
Also his blog: http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/
markbao · 2014-03-11
Folks seem to really like [0] his writing. Anything you recommend starting with?
[0]: See sidebar on his blog: http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/
sirsar · 2013-12-01
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/
giardini · 2008-09-29
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/
bokonist · 2008-08-31
I highly recommend Unqualified Reservations ( http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/ ) and Unenumerated ( http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/ )
Both are incredibly smart blogs, with very smart commenters. Their main shtick is bringing historical perspective to contemporary problems of government and economics. The result is fascinating and eye opening. I've learned more history from these two blogs then I learned from majoring in history at Yale.
samatman · 2021-07-25
Money in a broad sense is as old as anatomically modern humans, so, no.
80,000 year old grave goods have been discovered, consisting of shells of a consistent size, with holes drilled in them, a few hundred kilometers from the ocean. We know from ethnography of societies which existed until very recently that these collectibles served the same purpose as money.
A good complement to Graeber's book is the work of Nick Szabo, I would start here:
https://fermatslibrary.com/s/shelling-out-the-origins-of-money
You can find most of the rest of his writing on the subject on his blog: http://unenumerated.blogspot.com
SkyMarshal · 2021-01-09
This is one of the best explanations of the root design problem in cryptocurrency engineering. Almost every engineering design decision and tradeoff can be traced back to this problem.
For anyone wondering whether cryptocurrency in general, or any particular cryptocurrency, is a scam or not, you have to understand this core problem, and use it in your evaluation criteria, in order to make up your own mind about it.
Nick Szabo also wrote about it a few years ago, also worth reading, but it's more general than the OP link:
http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2015/05/small-game-fallacies.html
seven4 · 2020-06-12
As someone who hasn't played Animal Crossing - this is kind of surreal. Sounds like a glitch in the way game mechanics allowed users to hyper-inflate the primary currency (by manually changing the time on their system) - and saw the economy migrate to a currency which more readily fits with a model of "unforgeable costliness".
Great writeup on that by Nick Szabo
http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2005/10/antiques-time-gold-and-bit-go…
tim333 · 2018-02-22
There is perhaps a bit more to cryptocurrencies that Singer gives them credit for. I've recently been reading some of the original stuff from Szabo / Satoshi eg http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2005/12/bit-gold.html and https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf that partly explain why they have worked and not collapsed 9 years later. A lot of it is much clearer than the hype which has followed.
psyc · 2017-11-06
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
fchollet · 2015-01-10
How would you guarantee the trustworthiness of a node? How do you guarantee that a node is actually doing what it is supposed to and not inserting malware into its results? Reputation systems can be gamed (and will be if there's money at stake).
I like the notion of trustworthy, general-purpose, publicly distributed computing: http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2014/12/the-dawn-of-trustworthy-compu…
carsongross · 2014-03-12
I loved this one:
http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2006/02/irreducible-complexity-of-soc…
But any random post of his is likely to be intensely interesting, even if you don't agree with some of his conclusions.
VMG · 2014-03-10
Nitpick: you linked to his very interesting static page, his blog is at http://unenumerated.blogspot.de/
gwern · 2011-10-11
> Bitcoin is hardly innovative in cryptographic research (in fact, that's part of its appeal, since it makes it more trustworthy
Nick Szabo disagrees: http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2011/05/bitcoin-what-took-ye-so-long.…
sielskr · 2009-07-29
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.
pelle · 2008-09-04
Split, Croatia is also great it's actually a medieval city built inside a Roman palace:
http://flickr.com/photos/pelle/sets/72157604400174148/
Close by is the island of Hvar, which is also pretty amazing. It was built by the Venetians as a trading outpost:
http://flickr.com/photos/pelle/sets/72157604497939272/
A great resource for someone wanting to learn about how these kinds of places help mold our modern business world, I recommend Nick Szabo's blog Unenumerated. See this post about Genoa for example:
http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2006/10/genoa.html
ftlio · 2017-02-25
This stratfor article discusses the natural capital afforded to the US:
https://www.stratfor.com/analysis/geopolitics-united-states-part-1-ine… 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…
So yes, the actual land we occupy is worth booku bucks.
koberstein · 2014-12-19
A_D_E_P_T · 2025-03-28
Not at all. It's just inconvenient for most of the Windows-using world, as the characters are not accessible. It's ALT+[whatever] or Google-it-and-ctrl+V. Hence an awful lot of internet writing didn't really use any of that stuff properly.
See, e.g., Boss Szabo's blog: https://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2018/03/the-many-traditions-of-non-g…
Two chained hypens, as was pretty much the norm back then.
And did you just call me an NPC?!? It's not a matter of "understanding the language" at all. It's a matter of convenience and of a sort of evolved convention.
Stevvo · 2023-10-06
Here is Szabo last post about Bitgold before he renamed it to Bitcoin; http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2008/04/bit-gold-markets.html?m=1#374…
It describes the architecture of Bitcoin exactly. It is conclusive evidence that Szabo invented Bitcoin.
piercebot · 2021-06-15
Blastomere links to Nick Szabo blog posts:
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=blastomere
...links to:
http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2005/12/bit-gold.html
jron · 2021-03-31
Nick Szabo's counterargument: http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2011/05/bitcoin-what-took-ye-so-long.…
jtanner · 2021-02-10
Yes it's Bitcoin is inefficient, but in exchange we get social scalability.
https://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2017/02/money-blockchains-and-social…
jagiammona · 2020-01-05
Nick Szabo comes to a similar conclusion:
http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2012/08/proxy-measures-sunk-costs-and…
hanslet · 2019-06-22
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
daics · 2018-01-03
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-…
alexmat · 2017-12-20
ideological beliefs about the nature of money (liberals not interested in non-state currencies, and Austrians believing that currencies must have intrinsic value)
https://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2011/05/bitcoin-what-took-ye-so-long…
wyc · 2017-09-19
That's a good point about taxes. I wonder how the tax structures of the future will evolve if cryptocurrencies reach full swing. It could be reasonable to expect elaborate tariff systems that skim off the channels bridging wet and dry worlds[0]. With what we have today, there is already slightly less to tax[1], and with the ideas of today, there could be even less. You can't siphon tax if it's not in the contract code.
[0] https://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2006/11/wet-code-and-dry.html
[1] http://fortune.com/2017/03/19/irs-bitcoin-lawsuit/
macroexchange · 2017-09-18
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/000000000019d6689c085ae165831e934ff763…
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_yUeuKu7L4