The Many Lives Of A Bitcoin Developer

Amir Taaki's life resembles that of Bitcoin, the criptocurrency he helped to develop: it's very contradictory, most of the people don't understand it, but many love to talk and write about it.

Taaki became an early star among the Bitcoin community for being responsible for Dark Wallet, a sort of untraceable payment system. Thought of as a tool to fight against banks and governments, it ended up being used by criminals and money-launderers, including ISIS.

Maybe that was the reason that pushed Taaki to join the fight against the so-called Islamic State. He traveled to Rojava in 2015, the Kurdish-controlled area of North Syria, to offer his hacking skills. Instead, he was given a weapon. War is war. During his time in Syria he learned about Abdullah Öcalan, founder of the PKK, and his political/philosophical views. He was impressed by the democratic confederalism, a political system envisioned by Öcalan (in prison since 1999) and never really put into practice.

Amir Taaki believes it's an idea worth spreading in order to fight against the tyranny of banks, multinational corporations and imperialistic governments. The fact that his much-admired Kurdish movement defeated ISIS precisely thanks to U.S. military support doesn't seem to count.

Taaki is preparing for action. He's back in Europe and wants to create an army of five people to take the bitcoin back from the hands of greedy speculators and transform it into a tool for his recently acquired ideology.

So, as Volpicelli asks himself in the text, should we take Taaki seriously?

Yes and no: Taaki’s plan is ambitious to the point of megalomania, and quite a lot of things will have to fall in place for a five-person hacker team to be able to bring down the global state system. But it would be wrong to discount Taaki’s ability to effect change — after all, Dark Wallet made it to a European Union paper on cryptocurrencies’ challenges, in a box included in the terrorism and money laundering section.