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Meet Nick Szabo: The Silent Genius Who Created Bitcoin – CHAPTER[1.6]

If you read the white paper released by Satoshi on 31st Oct 2008 to Metzdowd.com cryptography mailing list or his 575 forum posts at bitcointalk.org, you will observe that his written style has the flawless, fluent and idiomatic rhyme of a native English speaker. Which proves that, Satoshi was not Japanese at all but someone living among native English speakers.

Satoshi Nakamoto is for sure not Japanese but in fact of Hungarian descent and his true name is Nick Szabo.

NaKamoto SAtOshiNicK SzAbO

Note: How did Nick Szabo came up with this fictitious name and how is Nick related to Hal Finney. We will discuss later in this chapter. Keep reading as we unfold this mystery sequentially.

Nick Szabo is a polymath and a genius in short. He is a computer scientist, legal scholar, and extra ordinary cryptographer. Nick is best known for his pioneering research in smart contracts and cryptocurrency. His revolutionary Smart contracts are the building blocks of cryptocurrency and the programming language E.

Smart contracts is the second big thing Nick is working on after having successfully implemented his concept of Bitcoin or Bitgold.

Smart contracts will make traditional contract laws decentralized, through which two strangers will be able to sign commerce or legal agreements online without the need for an intermediary to act as a law firm. Exactly similar to how two strangers can send and receive bitcoin transactions without needing an intermediary to act as a bank.

In future through smart contracts you will be able to do more things with cryptocurrencies. For example you will be able to send Bitcoins automatically to a service provider after he fulfills all the requirements of the contract which was signed by both of you. (i.e. online decentralized agreement stored on ethereum blockchain).

In an Ethereum Developer Conference, Nick Szabo presented a historical course to Ethereum smart contracts which can literally replace an army of lawyers and accountants if Ethereum is deployed across the globe for automating law and accountancy corporations.

Today Ethereum is in short the operating system platform on top of which you can code and design any decentralized app (DApp) or any new cryptocurrency that you want. It is the engine that powers all Initial Coin Offering (ICO) campaigns (cryptocurrency crowd funding).

Anyone who believes Ethereum is an idea of a 24 year old Russian-Canadian programmer by the name Vitalik Buterin is brainwashed by the same bogus fairy tale story which tells a non-techy that Bitcoin is invented by a Japanese Jesus-like Messiah called Satoshi Nakamoto.
Both Bitcoin and Ethereum [Original unedited Ethereum whitepaper published by Vitalik under Nick Szabo’s supervision back in in Dec 2013] whitepapers have no mention of Nick Szabo while both these technologies are based on the concept of Bitgold [Source] and Smart Contracts [Source] respectively, which are protocols designed, conceptualized and coded by Nick Szabo during 1997-2005.

I will explain in Chapter#2 why Vitalik does not qualify to be called the Ethereum founder and why he is just a stage actor like the pseudonym used for Bitcoin. I will also explain how this teenager who was badly in need of money was picked to lead this new million dollar venture. You will learn a lot there about this Japanese-Russian Drama.

Saying that Ethereum was designed and coded by Vitalik (who could barely afford to create a portfolio website) is same as saying that the biggest platform for decentralized apps & smart contracts is invented by a 19 year old teenager in 2013:

who could be hired for less than $5 in 2011, who hardly knew how to connect the bitcoin client in 2011, who has almost no online existence before 2011, who needed donations to post articles, and who can barely explain the terminology “smart contracts” four years later in 2017 and has to take help from Nick Szabo’s literature as witnessed through his tweets.

Nick Szabo often corrects Vitalik when he goes wrong and often reminds him of who the real boss is and who leads Ethereum network. I found an interesting tweet on Nick Szabo’s profile. Read the tweet below to see it for yourself:

The above tweet is a perfect example to prove the exact role of Vitalik in Ethereum network which is nothing more than an employee hired for a job. While legal and accounting decisions are always dictated by the employer. Which for both Bitcoin and Ethereum is none but Nick Szabo himself.

To further prove who is the mastermind behind the Ethereum’s code why don’t you give a look at the denominations of Ether currency.

Look carefully at Ether’s denominations written as JSON name/value pairs inside unitMap and see it for yourself what is hard coded deep inside the heart of Ether.

var unitMap = {
‘wei’: ‘1’,
‘kwei’: ‘1000’,
‘ada’: ‘1000’,
‘femtoether’: ‘1000’,
‘mwei’: ‘1000000’,
‘babbage’: ‘1000000’,
‘picoether’: ‘1000000’,
‘gwei’: ‘1000000000’,
‘shannon’: ‘1000000000’,
‘nanoether’: ‘1000000000’,
‘nano’: ‘1000000000’,
szabo‘: ‘1000000000000’,
‘microether’: ‘1000000000000’,
‘micro’: ‘1000000000000’,
‘finney’: ‘1000000000000000’,
‘milliether’: ‘1000000000000000’,
‘milli’: ‘1000000000000000’,
‘ether’: ‘1000000000000000000’,
‘kether’: ‘1000000000000000000000’,
‘grand’: ‘1000000000000000000000’,
‘einstein’: ‘1000000000000000000000’,
‘mether’: ‘1000000000000000000000000’,
‘gether’: ‘1000000000000000000000000000’,
‘tether’: ‘1000000000000000000000000000000’
};

Note the highlighted names above and go back and read Nick Szabo’s 2011 blog post on bitcoin when he mentions his closest friendly circle of the cypherpunks team:

Myself, Wei Dai, and Hal Finney were the only people I know of who liked the idea enough to pursue it to any significant extent until Nakamoto. [Source]

Did you notice something else?

We are being told that Ethereum is coded by Vitalik along with some other programmers. Vitalik and his friends mentioned almost every cryptographer in ether denominations but he didn’t mention Nakamoto? I think it was Nakamoto who created Bitcoin (according to the crypto enthusiasts and their masters) and who inspired Vitalik to build an OS platform for Bitcoin called Ethereum.

How come he forgot mentioning his mentor? Although there were plenty of denominations(name/value pairs) to be allocated as tribute to Nakamoto. Funny he mentioned Wei Dai four times but didn’t mention Satoshi Nakamoto even once anywhere.

Why? Simple answer: Why mention a pseudonym when you can directly mention the original name of the Bitcoin creator as Ether denomination i.e. Nick Szabo.

Vitalik did that just beautifully by mentioning his mentor Nick Szabo and also Nick’s University friend Wei Dai and his Cypherpunk friend Hal Finney.

The tribute to cypherpunks is given in ascending order of ether denominations as metric prefixes as shown below:

Smallest Unit – 100 – wei

kilo – 103 – kwei

mega – 106 – mwei

giga – 109 – gwei

tera – 1012 – szabo

peta – 1015 – finney

When asked why did he choose such denominations, Vitalik replied on a ethereum stackexchange forum arguing:

I would say as a matter of style, stick to using wei, shannon, finney and ether. Ether = main unit. Finney = for micropayments. Shannon = for gas prices. Wei = for discussion around APIs and other use cases where you need to talk about the underlying unit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hal_Finney_%28computer_scientist%29

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Szabo

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Shannon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Babbage

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Wei_Dai

The names aren’t all meant to be used at the same time; the goal of specifying suggestions for all of them was to have some schelling point on what to use for smaller denominations so that people could easily talk about varying quantities of ether regardless of whether the ETH price was $0.01, $10 or $100,000. In Bitcoin, the community is finding it hard to agree on a smaller denomination (though I suspect that the choice of 10^8 as the base denomination instead of something 10^3n also wasn’t helpful), and so we see people talking about 0.0037 BTC, etc all the time; this was what I wanted to avoid. “Millibitcoin” is hard to pronounce in a way that “finney” isn’t (also, do you reallywant to tell a cashier at a bank that you want to purchase “five hundred mETH”?).

Again Vitalik skipped discussing why he used szabo.. He only discussed wei, finney and shannon. According to Vitalik’s logic it is difficult to pronounce kilo but easy to pronounce kwei, difficult to say peta but easy to say finney and difficult to pronounce tera but easy to say szabo.. Really Vitalik?

Anyone who has completed his basic schooling would know what kilo, mega or giga means because it is a standard matrix prefix used in mathematics widely but to understand what zabo means, they will need to Google first!

If all this evidence of who actually created Bitcoin and Ethereum still sounds nonsense to you than you can continue celebrating this young kid as the 21st century Einstein whose name must be printed in Guinness book of world records…
Nothing impressed me more than his Google Blogger blog entitled as Unenumerated and I will tell you why in a short while.

If your read his articles on his blog or hear his podcasts, you will clearly observe that only a man with IQ 160 could sound such.

You will hardly find his image online with his family or friends. Not even wikipedia has his photo of how he looks like. His blog and social media accounts have no pictures of him. The conferences he attends are private or never made public. The companies he joins, don’t share his information with anyone (eg:- Vaurum). The images if any you find online of Nick Szabo before 2015 are leaked images.

From May 15, 2015 onwards (when New York Times first mentioned Nick Szabo as the most possible creator of Bitcoin, although even they didn’t share his pictures…) his images and interviews are now coming frequently after people started questioning him if he is the bitcoin creator. Although he always preferred staying under the shadows.

As a computer programmer myself and as a student of further mathematics and developer of Google hosted Blogger blogs for the past 10 years, I am 101% sure that the only man capable of coding and crafting Bitcoin protocol is none other than Nick Szabo.

Why Nick Szabo Used a Japanese Pseudonym?

Pseudonym is defined as a fictitious name or pen name, especially one used by an author. Many best selling authors have used pseudonyms to mask their real identities.

Popular examples include British novelist, J.K. Rowling, who used a male pseudonym of Robert Galbraith to write the famous crime fiction novel The Cuckoo’s Calling” in 2013. She was later exposed to have betrayed her honest readers but surprisingly instead of her sales going down, the sales skyrocketed!

This is enough proof to say that the world today loves imaginary characters more than real characters.

Another popular example is that of Erika Leonard who used the Pen name: E L James to author the novel: “Fifty Shades of Grey”

NicK SzAbO who used the pseudonym of SAtOshi NaKamoto and authored several interesting blog posts on history, economics, technology and law is no exception. There could have been no better pen name for the author of Bitcoin whitepaper than this Japanese pseudonym that translates perfectly to its original creator.

NaKamoto SAtOshiNicK SzAbO

Now coming to the question that how did Nick Szabo get an idea to use this Japanese name as his pseudonym?

Hal Finney was Nick Szabo’s Closest Friend Since 1993. Hal finney was the same man who received the first Bitcoin transaction from Satoshi and who helped Satoshi in coding the Bitcoin Software before releasing it officially in 2008.

In a cypherpunk’s email log on “Cypherpunk trends & visions”, Nick Szabo expressed his wish-list. Creating a digital cash was amongst his priorities in the wish-list. Which is a clear evidence that Nick was working on a decentralized digital currency since 1993.

Nick said that his own vision of cypherpunks evolution runs along the following

lines.

Digital cash: accumulating credits/debits for use of on-line

services (including travel services, concert tickets, etc.

purchased on-line), eventually paid for by some “real” currency:

FRNs, yen, etc. Implemented with Chaum-style protocol to prevent

forgery
and assure privacy.

Among the cypherpunks team members, Hal Finney was the only one who replied instantly the same day (Sun, 15 Aug 93) to his email and openly expressed his support for a Digital Cash. Finney replied:

“I have a shorter-term focus than Nick’s proposals for digital coupons

and cash. Here’s what would be on my cypherpunks wish list:”

Digital cash: We badly need some implementation to start playing with;

some net-based game which uses the digital cash. Digital postage

stamps for the remailers.”

Thus the only man who was extremely close to both Satoshi Nakamoto and Nick Szabo was Hal Finney. Which makes it quite obvious that Satoshi and Szabo are not two different people but a single man whose original name is Nick Szabo…

Relax! We have tones of more evidence to prove it more strongly as you continue reading this article.

If you read the full contents of the above emails by following the links, you will realize that Nick Szabo also lived in California (he attended several Silly Valley Cypherpunks meetings) where Hal Finney and Dorian Nakamoto also lived.

Since Dorian Prentice Satoshi Nakamoto lived just two blocks away from Hal Finney’s home in San Bernadino, California, the last two words of Dorian’s name might have looked too interesting to Nick Szabo as it sounded like a good pen name which perfectly matched the starting letters of his name. (i.e. N & S).

Satoshi Nakamoto translated just perfectly to Szabo Nick and vice versa.

Thus Nick took it as a great idea to use this fictitious name in the Bitcoin Whitepaper and all his electronic accounts to divert the attention of all crypto-community towards Japan so that he could remain camouflaged behind this name to avoid getting exposed.

Through all this evidence that I have shared so far and much to come ahead, it is crystal-clear that Satoshi was none other than Szabo, a polymath wearing the mask of a Japanese pseudonym.

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