It would also be the start of a trend among Extropians: Max O'Connor became Max More; Mark Potts became Mark Plus; Harry Shapiro became Harry Hawk. And Tom Morrow and FM-2030. Nick Szabo was an Extropian.
So did Nick change his name?
Szabo said only Finney and Nakamoto had the motivation to accomplish it, but if you research 2007 you will see Zooko was fired up about creating Szabo's ideas.
Zooko was also unemployed from 2007(the year Nakamoto said he started working on Bitcoin) and stayed that way until Nakamoto disappeared. Zooko was also posting about Bitcoin 23 days after it was put online.(trying to get people in different circles to check it out)
http://originalcontroltheory.tumblr.com/And thank you for the Zooko leads.
Bitcoin is the exact implementation of the system envisioned by Tim C. May, Wei Dai, Nick Szabo, Hal Finney and Zooko.
A few more Zooko links...
1999 Zooko moving up in the cypherpunks
http://www.shmoo.com/mail/cypherpunks/jun99/msg00373.html2007
http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2007/06/nanobarter.html?m=12007
http://lowlife.jp/yasusii/blogmark/2007/08/2007/2008 Zooko c++
https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/pycryptopp/ticket/3http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zookohttp://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooko%27s_trianglehttp://themonetaryfuture.blogspot.com/2011/05/bitcoin-timing-is-everything.html?m=1"Nick Szabo and Zooko Wilcox-OHearn disagree strongly with the thesis that Bitcoin is Worse is Better. They contend while there may be bad parts to Bitcoin, there is a novel core idea which is actually very clever - the hash chain is a compromise which thinks outside the box and gives us a sidestep around classic problems of distributed computing, which gives us something similar enough to a trustworthy non-centralized authority that we can use it in practice." ~gwern
Zooko: May 31, 2011 at 6:42 PM
"Gwerns post fails to appreciate the technical advances that BitCoin originated."
"I have been trying, off and on, to invent a decentralized digital payment system for fifteen years (since I was at DigiCash). I wasnt sure that a practical system was even *possible*, until BitCoin was actually implemented and became as popular as it has. Scientific advances often seem obvious in retrospect, and so it is with BitCoin."
Zooko: May 31, 2011 at 6:44 PM
"Oh wait, I have to revise this, as I remember trying to invent a decentralized digital payment system in about 1995, which was before I joined DigiCash. :-)"