All concepts
Concept
Computer science
Smart Contracts
First appeared Jan 1994
Why it matters
Szabo's framing of contracts as protocols influenced how the cypherpunks thought about money as software — and Script is the seed of all later blockchain programmability.
What it is
Self-executing agreements expressed in code, a term and concept introduced by Nick Szabo in the 1990s. Bitcoin's Script enables a constrained form of programmable conditions on spending.