a specter has returned to ethereum: the specter of code that runs without an operator.

szab0 is an erc-20 on ethereum. lowercase name, lowercase symbol, eighteen decimals. it is a tribute to nick szabo, who described smart contracts in 1994 before any blockchain existed to run them. it does not launch and graduate and migrate. there is no roadmap, no v2, no fork, no successor token. the contract that exists is the contract.

szab0 has a fixed supply cap of 19,994,000 tokens. the contract is the sole issuer. there is no team treasury, no premine, no foundation allocation, no insider round. ownership is renounced. no party controls the contract.

minting costs 0.0004 eth and issues 10 szab0. the total issuance period covers 1,971,000 mint rounds. when the final round completes, minting closes permanently and cannot be reopened. the contract enforces this. there is no extension.

what miners are to bitcoin, the contract is to szab0. bitcoin's issuance is gated by hash power; szab0's is gated by a fixed price schedule. both convert outside-system effort into inside-system supply via a transparent, verifiable rule.

when minting completes, the contract deploys a uniswap v2 liquidity position automatically. 284,000 szab0 and the accumulated lp fund are committed to the pool at the moment of the last mint. there is no operator button, no deployment key, no multisig. the final mint triggers it directly.

liquidity provider tokens are sent to address(0). the pool cannot be unwound by any party. the lp exists as long as ethereum exists.

a portion of each mint payment flows into the buyback reserve held inside the contract. the reserve is not a treasury. no party can withdraw it, redirect it, or spend it except through the buyback mechanism.

after the lp launch, the contract executes automated buybacks on uniswap v2. once per hour, a fraction of the reserve is spent to purchase szab0 from the open market. bought tokens return to the contract and are permanently removed from circulation. the reserve cannot be drained except through this mechanism. there is no other path.

the buyback rate is not fixed. it follows a four-phase schedule keyed to reserve depletion. as the reserve contracts, the protocol responds with greater intensity. the curve is convex: pressure compounds as supply shrinks.

each phase doubles the hourly depletion rate. the schedule is encoded in the contract and cannot be changed by any party. the curve runs until the reserve reaches zero.

ownership is renounced. there is no admin key, no upgrade path, no emergency function, no governance mechanism. the protocol fee recipient is an immutable address set at deployment. it cannot be changed, overridden, or redirected.

if everyone who built this disappeared tonight, the contract would run tomorrow against the same rules. the buybacks would execute. the lp would remain. the reserve would deplete on schedule. that is what renounced means. that is the only feature.

it is not a governance token. it does not entitle the holder to any decision-making power. there is no dao, no multisig, no future vote.

it is not a utility token. there is no product to unlock with it. it is not a stablecoin. its price is not pegged to anything. it is not a team vehicle. the team allocation is zero.

it is a tribute with a mechanical buyback protocol and an immutable contract. the mechanics are the product. nick szabo described this in 1994. it took thirty years to run it.