Amir Taaki

Amir Taaki
Amir Taaki in Bratislava, 2012
Taaki in Bratislava, 2012
Born (1988-02-06) 6 February 1988 (age 38)
London, United Kingdom
OccupationProgrammer
Military career
AllegianceRojava
BranchYPG
Service years2015
ConflictsSyrian Civil War
Websiteagorism.dev

Amir Taaki (Persian: امیر تاکی; born 6 February 1988) is a British-Iranian anarchist revolutionary, hacktivist, and programmer who is known for his leading role in the Bitcoin project, and for pioneering many open source projects.[1][2] Forbes listed Taaki in their 30 Under 30 listing of 2014.[3][4] Driven by the political philosophy of the Rojava revolution, Taaki traveled to Syria to served in the YPG military and work in Rojava's civil society.

Early life, family and education

Amir Taaki was born 6 February 1988[5] in London, the eldest of three children of a Scottish-English[6] mother and an Iranian father who is a property developer. Taaki was raised in nearby Kent.[7] From an early age Taaki took an interest in computer technology, teaching himself computer programming.[8]

He briefly attended two British universities.[6]

Activity and activisim

Taaki gravitated to the free software movement. Taaki assisted in the creation of SDL Collide, an extension of Simple DirectMedia Layer, an open source library used by video game developers.[9]

In 2009 and 2010, Taaki made his living as a professional poker player.[8] His experience with online gambling attracted him to the Bitcoin project.[10] At one point, he was listed among Bitcoin's main developers.[11] He founded the first UK Bitcoin exchange, "Britcoin", which was succeeded in 2011 by a new British exchange called Intersango, in which he was a principal developer.[12][7] Intersango has since closed.[13]

In 2012, Taaki organized the first Bitcoin conference in London.[14]

In 2014, together with Cody Wilson, he launched the Dark Wallet project after a crowdfunding run on IndieGoGo which raised over $50,000.[15][16][17] Taaki, along with other developers from Airbitz, a Bitcoin software company, created a prototype for a decentralised marketplace, DarkMarket, in 2014, at a hackathon in Toronto, which was forked into the OpenBazaar project.[18]

As of 2013, he resided in an anarchist squat in the former anti-G8 HQ building in London, England.[19][20]

Driven by the political philosophy of the Rojava revolution,[21] in 2015, Taaki went to Rojava (Syrian Kurdistan) to offer his skills to the revolution and served the YPG military.[22] He had no training but spent three and a half months in the YPG military fighting on the front. He was then discharged and worked in the civil society on various projects for Rojava's economics committee.[21]

In February 2018, Taaki created a group in Catalonia dedicated to leveraging blockchain technology to help national liberation causes such as the Catalan independence movement.[23]

In 2023, Politico reported that Taaki was working on DarkFi, an anarchist project that aimed to allow people to form organizations that collectively raise and distribute money in complete secrecy.[24]

Taaki appears in the Bitcoin documentary Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery,[25] released in October 2024. He has publicly disagreed with the film's theory of Peter Todd as Satoshi Nakamoto.[26]

See also

References

  1. ^ Colao, J.J. "Amir Taaki, 25 - In Photos: 2014 30 under 30: Technology". Forbes. Archived from the original on 9 January 2014.
  2. ^ Ball, James (20 April 2012). "Hacktivists in the frontline battle for the internet". The Guardian. London. Retrieved 20 April 2012.
  3. ^ "Forbes 30 Under 30". Forbes. Retrieved 4 October 2018.
  4. ^ "Meet the world's next billionaires - from Mashable's Pete Cashmore to Bitcoin renegade Amir Taaki". The Independent. 7 January 2014. Archived from the original on 7 January 2014.
  5. ^ "Amir Taaki". companieshouse.gov.uk. Companies House. Retrieved 4 October 2018.
  6. ^ a b Herrmann, Joshi (29 January 2014). "Silicon Roundabout's not for him: meet super-hacker, master coder and Bitcoin boy Amir Taaki in his Hackney squat". Retrieved 30 June 2015.
  7. ^ a b Bartlett, Jamie (2015). The dark net : inside the digital underworld. Brooklyn. ISBN 978-1-61219-489-9. OCLC 900594552.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  8. ^ a b "Speakers 2011". epcaconference.com. 11th International EPCA Summit European Payments Consulting Association. Archived from the original on 26 March 2011. Retrieved 11 October 2011.
  9. ^ "SDL_Collide". SourceForge. 8 January 2015. Retrieved 4 October 2018.
  10. ^ Ball, James (22 June 2011). "Bitcoins: What are they, and how do they work?". The Guardian. Retrieved 13 April 2024.
  11. ^ Herrmann, Joshi (10 July 2015). "The Anarchist Hacker Bitcoin Would Rather Not Talk About". Vice. Retrieved 13 August 2021.
  12. ^ "About Us: Personal Statements". intersango.com. Intersango britcoin co uk. Archived from the original on 26 April 2012.
  13. ^ "Cryptoanarchists pull trigger on fight over future of Bitcoin". Financial Times. 31 October 2013.
  14. ^ Healy, Hazel (1 December 2012). "Internet showdown: Why digital freedom matters to us all". New Internationalist. London. Retrieved 16 August 2022.
  15. ^ Del Castillo, Michael (24 September 2013). "Dark Wallet: A Radical Way to Bitcoin". The New Yorker. Retrieved 15 May 2014.
  16. ^ Greenberg, Andy (31 October 2013). "Dark Wallet Aims To Be The Anarchist's Bitcoin App of Choice". Forbes Online. Retrieved 15 May 2014.
  17. ^ Greenberg, Andy (29 April 2014). "'Dark Wallet' Is About to Make Bitcoin Money Laundering Easier Than Ever". Wired. Retrieved 15 May 2014.
  18. ^ Greenberg, Andy (24 April 2014). "Inside the 'DarkMarket' Prototype, a Silk Road the FBI Can Never Seize". Wired. Retrieved 23 August 2014.
  19. ^ Siddique, Haroon (11 June 2013). "G8: riot police enter central London building occupied by protesters". Retrieved 8 July 2015.
  20. ^ Copestake, Jen (19 September 2014). "Hiding currency in the Dark Wallet". Retrieved 8 July 2015.
  21. ^ a b Butter, Susannah (6 April 2017). "Tech enigma Amir Taaki on Forbes and fighting Isis in Syria". Standard.co.uk.
  22. ^ Greenberg, Andy (29 March 2017). "How an anarchist Bitcoin coder found himself fighting ISIS in Syria". Wired. Retrieved 4 October 2018.
  23. ^ Volpicelli, Gian (6 March 2018). "Amir fought Isis in Syria, now he's enlisting an army of hacker monks to save bitcoin from itself". wired. Retrieved 3 October 2018.
  24. ^ Schreckinger, Ben (2 February 2023). "A new crypto threat to government launches". politico.com. Politico. Retrieved 6 March 2023.
  25. ^ Hoback, Cullen (8 October 2024), Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery (Documentary), Cullen Hoback, Samson Mow, Ricardo Salinas Pliego, HBO Documentary Films, Hello Pictures, Hyperobject Industries, retrieved 29 October 2024
  26. ^ Taaki, Amir [@lunardragon420] (9 October 2024). "Satoshi Nakamoto wrote code that was not usual. He had many quirks..." (Tweet). Retrieved 24 December 2025 – via Twitter. "We can find him by comparing his code with others, but no one did that yet. When I first saw their code, I thought "Satoshi is not a programmer" because of how weird it was. He didn't follow normal code practices that were modern at that time. He made big use of locks when it was out of fashion. He used Hungarian notation which was no longer used. He made spaghetti function recursion and never used objects to encapsulate processes. He also targeted Windows. All of this indicate an older person, possibly not a software dev but from a close domain like engineering or physics. His whitepaper hinted at a background with a practical focus but not a mathematician. The code was highly idiosyncratic and personal including the style itself. Analysis of the code will tell us everything. You can even compare the code from 2008 with the code in 2010, and the way Satoshi writes code doesn't change. You can actually see the change from proof of concept to hacked up Satoshi node. Whenever anyone says X is Satoshi, my first response is always "show me the code". This should be our default position. But no Bitcoin coder (including myself) cares enough to do this. We're all so busy with real work. And I guess we also respect Satoshi-kun's wishes. Even writing this post showing how we can find him feels almost like a betrayal. To be fair to Peter Todd, he handled it well and didn't try to claim undue credit."
allikas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amir_Taaki