Father of Smart Contracts Reflects on the Decentralized Experiments Before Bitcoin's BirthNick Szabo, "father of smart contracts," recalled at a 2021 Bitcoin conference that the 1995 Extropy magazine discussed concepts like virtual banks and a digital currency called "Hayeks," though they were still theoretical. That year, he proposed smart contracts. He cited David Chaum's DigiCash, which used "blind signatures" for minimal trust, with its test token Cyberbucks seen as history's first true private digital ...