You just discovered something fascinating about the origins of crypto. Nick Szabo, the one called the father of smart contracts, shared at a Bitcoin conference in 2021 how it all started long before Bitcoin.

In 1995, in the magazine Extropy, there were already serious discussions about virtual banks and distributed networks. Nick Szabo himself introduced the concept of smart contracts that same year. It’s crazy to realize that decentralization was already being talked about back then.

But what really struck me is that he also mentioned David Chaum and his DigiCash. This guy used blind signatures to reduce the trust needed—a revolutionary concept for the time. And then there was Cyberbucks, which Szabo considers the first true private digital currency.

What’s interesting is that Nick Szabo facilitated the exchange of ideas through his mailing list Libtech. Major projects like Bit Gold, b-money, and RPOW emerged from there— all direct precursors to Bitcoin. It’s clear how these initiatives laid the conceptual foundations for the entire crypto ecosystem we know today.

This historical perspective really changes how we see Bitcoin. It wasn’t a creation out of nowhere, but rather the culmination of years of thought and experimentation within cryptography and financial freedom circles.