Short answers, pulled from the story.
Nick Szabo is an American computer scientist, legal scholar, and cryptographer who in 1998 designed bit gold, a decentralized digital currency widely described as a direct precursor to the Bitcoin architecture. He also originated the concept of smart contracts in the mid-1990s, writing foundational papers in 1994 and 1996.
Bit gold was a decentralized digital currency mechanism Szabo designed in 1998 but never implemented. Participants dedicated computer power to solving cryptographic puzzles; each solved puzzle was logged in a Byzantine fault-tolerant public registry and linked to the solver's public key, with each solution forming part of the next challenge in a growing chain.
Szabo introduced the phrase and concept of smart contracts, writing an initial paper in 1994 and a detailed exploration in 1996. His goal was to apply the evolved practices of contract law to electronic commerce protocols between strangers on the Internet.
Szabo has repeatedly denied being Satoshi Nakamoto. Financial author Dominic Frisby gathered circumstantial evidence but admitted no proof exists. In a July 2014 email to Frisby, Szabo wrote 'I'm afraid you got it wrong doxing me as Satoshi, but I'm used to it.'
Szabo earned a bachelor's degree in computer science from the University of Washington in 1989 and a Juris Doctor from George Washington University Law School. He also holds an honorary professorship at the Universidad Francisco Marroquin.
Szabo was focused on the double spend problem, the challenge of preventing the same digital coin from being spent twice. He described his aim as mimicking in cyberspace the security and trust characteristics of gold, specifically that gold does not depend on a trusted central authority.