Now with 2024 update
The most transparent cryptography experts are those that work in academia. Matthew D. Green is a professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University. Others work in industry and have prominent public profiles like Bruce Schneier (British Telecom) and Burt Kaliski (Verisign now RSA). Craig Gentry works for IBM; he developed fully homomorphic encryption about 10 years ago.
Some cryptographers have sub rosa personal lives, yet maintain updated websites including disclosure of who and where they have worked in the recent and less-recent past. Their websites aren't just blogs. They have plenty of well-organized content. Good examples are the steganography guys, Neil F. Johnson and Gary Kessler, who work as consultants and sometimes as longer-term contractors.
Nick Szabo is very cryptic!
It isn't easy to discern what Nick did or does for a living, or anything else about him, even with with pro-level google-fu! Nick Szabo has an undergraduate degree in computer science from the University of Washington in Seattle and a professional degree in the law (Juris Doctor, which is different than a PhD in law) from George Washington University. In the United States, a law degree is a three-year program of study. In one of Nick Szabo's Unenumerated blog posts, he acknowledged being a law school student in 2006. Let's assume he graduated in 2008.
Given his law degree, I would suggest checking to see if Nick is a member of the bar in any state. He may not be, as plenty of people with law degrees don't practice law although they use their knowledge of it in their work, and are often hired because of it. Examples include legal departments of financial services firms (both fintech and traditional), manufacturing companies, and healthcare of all sorts.
If one were to want to develop a digital currency, a high level of competency in computer science as well as a law degree seem ideal, although some knowledge of economics would help too. Many patent attorneys have similar backgrounds, e.g. a physics or electrical engineering undergraduate degree, three years or more of working in the field, then law school.
Nick has an extensive catalog of essays and a blog, but no insights are to be gleaned explicitly regarding his occupation. I can provide merely a single data point. Nick Szabo was retained as a consultant for about a year by Vaurum, a Silicon Valley start-up, from 2014 to 2015. Via The New York Times, Decoding the enigma of Satoshi Nakamoto and the birth of bitcoin:
In the beginning of 2014, Mr. Szabo joined Vaurum, a Bitcoin start-up based in Palo Alto, California, that was operating in stealth mode and that aimed to build a better Bitcoin exchange. After his arrival, Mr. Szabo helped reorient the company to take advantage of Bitcoin’s capability for so-called smart contracts, which enable self-executing financial transactions.
Wei Dai
As for Wei Dai, I know less. He is a Less Wrong contributor, see Overview for Wei Dai: Less Wrong with a huge karma score of 21,775 points! Apparently, Wei Dai is articulate and persuasive; however, no one earns a living from Less Wrong with the exception of Eliezer Yudkowsky. If I were Peter Thiel, I would have put my money on Wei Dai rather than Eliezer. Wei Dai has a formal education in computer science AND has clearly 'cracked the code' necessary to receive acclaim from the fussy, idiosyncratic yet often intelligent Less Wrong crowd.
Wei Dai has a nice website, Wei Dai's home page. Perhaps one could infer his occupation based on his expressed interests, e.g. his many years of activity in the USENET crypto-optimization forum.
Truly, it would be difficult to go wrong with most of the individuals associated with the 1990s Cypherpunk group, sometimes known as Extropians, to which Wei Dai and Nick Szabo both belonged. Even the most obstreperous members ("toxic" in today's terminology) such as Larry Detweiler, have an impressive record of accomplishment. Detweiler had a weird obsession with Nick Szabo and tentacles! More on that in another post.
Cryptocurrency talk
Be aware, you are not the first person who has wondered, "Nick Szabo, Wei Dai... Who are their employers?!". That links to a BitcoinTalk forum post. Regulars on IRC-style bitcointalk.org were intimidating when I visited. That's putting it mildly.
Mircea Popescu, may he rest in peace, was the domain owner of bitcointalk. He was voluble, clever, and well-informed about many matters in addition to cryptocurrency, although bitcoin was his path to fortune. He was banned after a few months of viciously criticizing Izabella Kaminski of the Financial Times. They got in HUGE arguments on Twitter!
Mircea was kind to me during his brief time on Twitter. He patiently explained DAGs (directed acyclic graphs) and other concepts to me. He told me, "You are a nice girl." That was thoughtful, as I was a childless, 48 year old widow. Mircea was a life interrupted: He was reported to have drowned while swimming in the ocean near his beachfront home in Costa Rica in 2021.
I found a fortuitously relevant post on Mircea's Trilema blog just now! It mentions both Michael O. Church (whom I will not try to explain... Michael O. Church has been kind to me too. I am grateful) AND Quora AND one of my least favorite Wikipedia editors, Flyer22 Reborn. We frequently argued. She was fawned over, reborn at least once, and in the midst of a huge argument with a transgender woman, Flyer22 died so she couldn't be banned for transphobic remarks.
Who is Nick Szabo?
Wei Dai remarked, on the record, that he isn't Nick Szabo:
I'm not Szabo but coincidentally we attended the same university and had the same major and graduated within a couple years of each other.
Wei Dai is referring to the University of Washington, where Nick Szabo acknowledges having graduated with a bachelor's degree in computer science. Ah, but Nick has TWO degrees!
Perhaps Wei Dai was referring to George Washington University and a Juris Doctor degree? No, I don't think so. Wei Dai seems quite precise with his English usage. "Major" is associated with an undergraduate degree. Juris Doctor is a professional degree, requiring completion of a four-year undergraduate program prior to applying for law school admission. Also, one does not "major" in a field for a graduate degree or professional degree.
Could Nick Szabo, the former mayor of Cupertino, California be Nick Szabo? I asked him.
Nick Szabo was aware of Mayor Nick but they were not the same person. I asked Nick Szabo if Mayor Nick was his father, and he told me, "No". We did determine that I worked for IBM in Silicon Valley at the same time as Nick's brother, but on different products.
Could Mayor Nick Szabo be Satoshi Nakamoto?
Now THAT would be a surprising twist!
Mayor Nick Szabo fought in the Siege of Budapest in his teen years, then fled to the United States due to the Communist takeover of Hungary in 1949. He was an orphan. He promptly applied to Caltech and four years later, graduated with a bachelors degree in physics, despite being an illegal immigrant at the time.
Next, Mayor Nick served in the U.S. Army during the Korean War. The chancellor of CalTech helped save Mayor Nick from being deported to Hungary upon discovery of his lack of legal residency status. After returning stateside from Korea, he got his master's degree at Stanford University, followed by a PhD in electrical engineering from the University of California at Berkeley.
Why electrical engineering? Most schools did not offer degrees in computer science until the early or even mid-1970s. For example, the former Chancellor of Stanford University, John Hennessey, was a professor then chairman of the school's department of computer science. Hennessey's terminal degree was a PhD in electrical engineering not computer science.
After completing his education and military service (in Hungary AND the United States), Mayor Nick had a lengthy career working for several multinational high tech companies. He then served as a member of the Technical Advisory Committee for Export Control of the U.S. Department of Commerce.
Sleuthing: What is iht.com etc?
I found the following description and summary of a presentation delivered by Mayor Nick, "The Road to Technological Competitiveness: Via Chicago or Scandinavia?" This is an unexpected title for a native of a Warsaw Pact country who fought against the USSR's brutal suppression in his youth. Given what is and what isn't mentioned, I'm guessing that it was presented in 2008 or 2009.
Despite excoriating the Chicago school of mostly monetarist economics in favor of what Senator Bernie Sanders extolled as "the Scandinavian Model" of government, education, defense policy, healthcare, and taxation, most of Mayor Nick's recommendations are solid and good:
- higher education in the United States is too expensive and continues to increase rapidly... we can't go on like this;
- we are either importing people to do middle- or upper middle-class jobs or exporting all sorts of jobs overseas instead of training our next generation to do them;
- fiscal profligacy by the U.S. government will cause great harm to us as a nation so we need to change our ways and spend more responsibly.
The data cited and policies suggested to address the above recommendations aren't the best. Some of that is the World Economic Forum's fault, not Mayor Nick's!
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| Klaus Schwab is Swiss |
This chart is hilarious
Mayor Nick thoughtfully provided a link to the chart, which led to more hilarity. Correcting for what is likely a URL typo, it is
http://www.iht.com/articles/2004/10/13/business/compete.php
No SSL (Secure Socket Layer) but that's okay. The article was published in 2004. I have noticed SSL falling by the wayside at many websites lately, which is odd but a subject for another day. What website could iht.com be? I clicked, and after a pause and a hiccup, I found myself at... The New York Times!
https://www.nytimes.com/articles/2004/10/13/business/compete.php
How could that happen? My parents were regular readers of The New York Times for national and world news because we lived in some remote places and it was the only comprehensive print news source available.
No, we couldn't buy it in town or have it delivered locally. Until 1985 or perhaps later, the NYT was only available in southern New Mexico via the US Post Office. As subscribers, we received it from the mailman, usually four to five days after the publication date. Of course, Las Cruces-Sun News and other small circulation daily papers were available with local reporting supplemented by wire services such as the Associated Press.
I vaguely recall from family vacations and an overseas relocation that my parents read a non-domestic version of the NYT, The International Herald Tribune. Content was mostly the same in the Herald Tribune but not identical to the domestic New York Times. There was no time delay if purchased from newspaper stands and large hotels in European cities, unlike the situation in Organ Pass, New Mexico!
International Herald Tribune = iht
I don't know why former Mayor Szabo of Cupertino would be reading the Herald Tribune version of the NYT but let's not get distracted.
The amusing part, to me, was the fact that the redirect to the nytimes.com version is not available on the nytimes.com website now, nor is it in the archives. NYT's search for U.S. versus global competitiveness in 2004 or so doesn't turn up anything either.
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| Bronze & aluminum bust of Satoshi (Budapest 2021) |
The summary and presentation are brief, five charts and two pages of text at most. Evaluating with the benefit of hindsight is difficult, but I suspect that Mayor Nick could have scooped Thomas Piketty ("Capital in the 20th Century") by several years if he had wanted to.
Inconclusive conclusion
Let's run the numbers. Mayor Nick Szabo was born in 1930 making him 78 in 2008.
According to that most notorious of sources, Wikipedia, Nick Szabo was born in 1964. (The date is unsourced.)
Hal Finney was born in 1956 and was an important bitcoin project contributor, whether or not he was Satoshi.
Hal Finney died in 2014, age 58. Mayor Nick died in 2015, age 85.
Nick Szabo is alive and well.
I have had a few Direct Message conversations on Twitter with Nick Szabo. He told me that 'Szabo' is a very common Hungarian surname, the equivalent of 'Smith' in English. That, combined with the timeline and lack of rigor in "Szabo on Government" above suggests that it is unlikely yet not impossible Mayor Nick Szabo had any involvement in the development of bitcoin.
Another popular candidate for the real Satoshi Nakamoto is John F. Nash. He was born in 1930, same as Mayor Nick Szabo.
In Budapest, there is a statue in honor of Satoshi Nakamoto. I hope to travel there and see it soon.
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