Nick Szabo, pioneer of intelligent contracts: "We must not forget decentralization"

Taking advantage of Synchronize 2018 conference held in New York City, the pioneer in the field of cryptography, Nick Szabo-famous for developing, for the first time, the concept of smart contracts in 1996-called for Do not lose sight of the original promise of the Blockchain: decentralization.

In the words of Szabo:

"I just want to connect the benefits of trust minimization and decentralization, the traditional banking model is: 'we trust in ourselves, so why do not you trust us?', Something that is not necessarily true, as many clients they do not trust banking institutions. "

It should be noted that the expert in intelligent contracts gave these statements to an audience formed, for the most part, by financial services professionals. Szabo took the stage shortly after Blythe Masters and David Rutter, representatives of Digital Asset and R3, promoted their platforms.

For their part, Szabo's fellow panelists were not so critical of corporate block chains. Shaul Kfir, CTO of Digital Asset, explained that he used to think that Bitcoin and Ethereum were great and that people dedicated to financial services do not know what they are doing. Today, Kfir has a different position:

"Today I am much more humble, they know what they are doing."

At the same time, Helen Altshuler, leader of the Google Cloud engineering program, argued in favor of "hybrid systems" that combine parameters of open and closed ecosystems.

In addition to the debate of open vs. closed platforms, much of the conversation focused on the reliability of smart contracts. And the fact is that the hard blow suffered by the DAO in 2016 still keeps the perception that smart contracts are still not suitable for high volume markets.

Despite this, Kfir said that the repository market managed by the US Department of the Treasury, where "USD $ 100 million is a small operation", is a use case that "applies very well to smart contracts" . In fact, to address these use cases, the panelists agreed that smart contract developers will join a standardization made up of already tested templates.