Nick Szabo, Computer Scientist, Cryptographer and Legal Scholar widely regarded as the inventor of the term ‘Smart Contract’ and many of the concepts it holds, will be the keynote speaker at DEVCON1, Ethereum’s yearly developer conference this 2015.
The conference is taking place this November the 9 -14 in London UK, and will be covering many aspects of blockchain technology including some engineering challenges that make up this new frontier.
Among them is a panel on scalability with Vitalik Buterin, Vlad Zamfir, Gavin Wood, Martin Becze, and Dominic Williams. As well as a presentation called "Securing Ethereum: One does not simply build a blockchain from scratch” by Gustav Simonsson.
It also features exploration of killer apps such as prediction markets, ‘Gaming on the Blockchain’ and the announcement that some believe was behind the recent rally of Ether’s price, “Microsoft: Ethereum Blockchain-as-a-Service.” Microsoft is also one of the sponsors of the conference.
Perhaps the most noteworthy presentation, however, will be Nick Szabo’s Keynote speech, taking place on the last day of the conference.
Szabo is easily one of the most remarkable Scholars of our time. His academic work explores the history of contract law, as well as the implementation of such in secure digital networks. He is widely regarded as one of the thought leaders behind technology like Bitcoin thanks to his work on Bitgold, alongside Adam Back who is credited with inventing the Proof -of-Work protocol that secures Bitcoin and of course, the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto (who some speculate to be Szabo himself).
If you are ever looking for a rabbit hole to go down, check out his blog which is now part of the Forbes Finance and Business Network.
Szabo is a will be covering the topic of “History of the blockchain, Smart Contracts and assets on the blockchain”.
Szabo recently expressed a keen interest in Ethereum during a Let’s Talk Bitcoin Episode, where he said that:
“If you want to have a flexible general purpose programming environment like programmers have been used to since the 1950s at least, then you’re going to want to use Ethereum because it’s got a Turing complete language and a large state. I sometimes make the comparison of a pocket calculator [Bitcoin] versus, say, a general purpose computer [Ethereum].”