I recently revisited Nick Szabo's speech at the 2021 Bitcoin conference and understood why he is considered one of the key figures in the history of decentralization. Nick Szabo talked about how, in the mid-90s, ideas that seemed like science fiction were already being discussed in the Extropy magazine — virtual banks, distributed networks, systems without central control. At that time, all of this was in its very primitive stages, but the main thing was that people were thinking about it at all.

It was in 1995 that Szabo introduced the concept of smart contracts, which later became the foundation for the entire ecosystem. But interestingly, Nick Szabo was not the first to try to solve the trust problem in digital systems. Before him, David Chaum developed DigiCash using blind signatures — a significant step toward minimizing the need for trust in intermediaries. His Cyberbucks is considered the first private digital currency, although most have forgotten about it.

What’s striking is how Szabo, through his Libtech mailing list, created a space for idea exchange. From this space, projects emerged that predated Bitcoin — Bit Gold, b-money, RPOW. Each of them was an attempt to solve different parts of the decentralization puzzle. Nick Szabo and his colleagues essentially laid all the fundamental building blocks that Satoshi Nakamoto later assembled into one system.

This is the story — decades of reflection and experimentation led to Bitcoin, and then to the entire cryptocurrency ecosystem we see today. Sometimes it seems that people underestimate this historical context, jumping straight to the latest trends.