Smart Contract Pioneer Nick Szabo: Don't Ditch Decentralization

Speaking at the Synchronize 2018 conference in New York City on Thursday, Nick Szabo, a pioneering cryptographer who first developed the concept of smart contracts in 1996, urged the audience not to lose sight of blockchains' original promise.

"I just want to plug the benefits of trust minimization and decentralization," he said while participating in a panel on smart contracts.

"The traditional banking model is 'we trust us, why don't you trust us?'" he continued, arguing that customers might not trust banks.

Szabo's fellow panelists were not as critical of enterprise blockchains.

Shaul Kfir, Digital Asset's chief technology officer, said that he used to think "Bitcoin is great, ethereum is great, those people in financial services probably don't know what they're doing."

Helen Altshuler, Google Cloud's engineering program lead, argued in favor of "Hybrid systems" that combine attributes of open and closed platforms.

In addition to the open-closed debate, much of the conversation focused on the reliability of smart contracts.

The DAO hack in 2016, which Chain CEO Adam Ludwin mentioned, has created the perception that smart contracts are not yet suited to large, high-volume markets.

Kfir argued that the U.S. Treasury repo market - where "$100 million is a small trade" - is a use case that "Lends itself very nicely" to smart contracts.

In order to tackle such use cases, the panelists agreed that smart contract developers would coalesce around a few tried and tested templates.