devcon 1

Nick Szabo, a legendary figure within cryptography who coined the term "smart contracts" back in the 1990s, will be the keynote speaker at the Ethereum developers conference Devcon1 in London next month.

Szabo, who does not make many public appearances, has been continuing his work on smart contracts within Ethereum and also within the context of the Bitcoin network via the sidechains project as well as Rootstock, which aims to marry Ethereum and Bitcoin, among other things.

In a recent interview with IBTimes, Szabo said Ethereum's more flexible and general language can facilitate a much wider variety of commercial and other formal relationships.

Szabo has said Bitcoin is like a pocket calculator in comparison to Ethereum as a general purpose computer, to illustrate the latter's Turing-complete capabilities.

Devcon1 takes place on 9-13 November in Gibson Hall in the City of London.