Nick Szabo on bitcoin, blockchain and the benefits of smart contracts

The CEO of Global Financial Assets Inc. spoke at the International Conference on Contract Simplification at the Swiss Re Centre for Global Dialogue. Learn more about risks in the crypto assets market: https://www.swissre.com/institute/res...

"Where smart contracts work best is well-defined financial contracts so smart contracts can greatly improve the cross border plumbing and the financial relationships that the insurance companies have with other financial companies and with other people in the world. In fact, to the extent they're dependent on companies, prime brokers, and big banks like JP Morgan and Chase and Goldman Sachs and so forth, they can reduce that dependency by talking more directly to their counter parties through smart contracts rather than through a prime broker.

For data protection, block chain is a very powerful tool for proving that something is not, it's like freezing something in amber, you can prove it hasn't been forged or altered after you put it on the block chain. Data confidentiality is much harder. There is a technology that is called zero knowledge computations that will allow for very small computations that are very important for the confidentiality, a very limited amount of confidential data processing but unfortunately, it doesn't scale so for big data, it's basically impossible to associate that with a block chain to keep it confidential.

Bitcoin works the same everywhere and Ethereum. They work the same everywhere in Albania, Zimbabwe, Argentina, United States, China, everywhere all over the world they work the same way with the same set of rules. We're going to see this being done more widely in the financial community that instead of nationally siloed financial systems that are dependent on law enforcement we're going to see more global vending machine like financial transactions."

Swiss Re
The Swiss Re Group is one of the world’s leading providers of reinsurance, insurance and other forms of insurance-based risk transfer, working to make the world more resilient. It anticipates and manages risk – from natural catastrophes to climate change, from ageing populations to cyber crime. The aim of the Swiss Re Group is to enable society to thrive and progress, creating new opportunities and solutions for its clients. Headquartered in Zurich, Switzerland, where it was founded in 1863, the Swiss Re Group operates through a network of around 80 offices globally.

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