February 2018, a Fab Lab on the east side of Barcelona. The venue is filled with plywood models, old monitors, small potted plants, and one toy robot. About ninety people are listening to a young man wearing black clothes and a black beret, with a close-cropped beard that gives him an air of martial intensity. He speaks with hesitant deliberation, leaving long pauses between words. The screen behind him shows the floorplan of a five-room flat: one toilet, one office, a large living room, and two bedrooms.

“We want to establish a headquarters here in Catalonia. To gather together a team of hackers, that we can then train and send to manage our projects,” the man says, in English. “It will be like a startup accelerator, only a politicised one. Not driven by profit, but by social change.”

The man is looking for five people — not necessarily tech-savvy people, but preferably young people, women (for reasons of gender equality), or ideologically radical individuals — to join his “dojo”. These “monk hackers” — or “autonomous polytechnics”, “spiritual warriors”, or simply “revolutionaries” — will live together, observe quasi-monastic discipline, and work towards a common goal: using technologies like bitcoin, blockchain, and open-source software to empower revolutionary movements around the globe, starting from pro-autonomy Catalonia. Their long-term objective, according to a 18-page handout distributed before the talk, is the “complete collapse of the world state system.”


The man has already found a potential place to set up the dojo, he says, pointing at the floorplan. But if anybody knows better, they should let him know. His details are on the handout, he says, as he scans the room quickly. “You can also find the contacts on my website. It’s AmirTaaki.org.”

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In early 2015, British bitcoin developer Amir Taaki vanished. His media appearances, until then frequent and outrageous, stopped abruptly. On Twitter, bitcoin nerds complained they couldn’t get hold of him. None of the hacktivists who used to live with him in a London “bitcoin squat”, had any idea of his whereabouts.

Then-27-year-old Taaki was a figure of worship in the bitcoin community, and a source of worries for governments, which — post Silk Road — were increasingly leery of how cryptocurrency could be used for illegal purposes. An outspoken anarchist, Taaki had sprung to notoriety when he started developing Dark Wallet, a payment system that would make bitcoin transaction totally untraceable. The idea was that individuals should be free to buy anything without banks or governments interloping; inevitably, though, Dark Wallet also appealed to criminals and money launderers — and to Isis, which recommended the technology in online posts. That had earned Dark Wallet, and Taaki, some rather bad press. It was more or less at that point that he had disappeared.


He resurfaced in September 2015. Not in the flesh, but in a series of out-of-the-blue emails to anarchist mailing list Unsystem. Most of them mentioned Rojava, a Kurdish-controlled de facto autonomous region in Northern Syria. This wasn’t just an academic interest: Taaki was actually in Syria, fighting on the side of Rojava against Isis. He felt it was his duty to defend Rojava’s unique blend of federalism and direct democracy from the terrorists trying to obliterate it.

Taaki offered his technology skills, but the Kurds handed him a Kalashnikov and sent him to the frontline. He had no military training, but, he says, he quickly picked up the art of fighting. He learnt to appreciate the technical aspects of war — the way you need to clean and oil your guns every day; the way snipers have to factor in gravity pull and wind direction when trying to snuff out an enemy far away — but he often caught himself yawning. “Ninety-nine percent of the time you sit around waiting,” he says. “War is really boring.”

Of course, there were some moments when Taaki did experience the terror of the battlefield, during gunfights, in which he may or may not have killed Isis fighters (he says battles were fought at a long range, so it’s impossible to tell); near-missing bullets; black-clad goons closing in on his post.

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“Thinking you can die is a very scary experience. But when you get to the front, and you have a gun in your hand, the fact that you could die it's something you can deal with,” he says. “What's more difficult is losing your friends: dozens of my friends died.”


Taaki spent three months and a half fighting, before finally managing to get hold of Rojava’s economic committee and focusing his energies on civilian projects such as the crowdfunding and construction of fertiliser factories.

He eventually flew back to Britain in 2016, and like everyone returning from Syria he was stopped by the police, and put under house arrest. He managed to get his passport back some months later, and immediately left the country. When I called him on Signal, in September 2017, he was in Argentina. I asked him how he was spending his days, and whether he had any plans for the near future.

“I want to visit hackers, anarchist hackers, and anarchists groups,” he said. “I am studying a lot of different literature to understand where technology should go over the next 20 years.“ He wanted to meld his identities of bitcoin coder, anarchist bete noire, and Rojava foreign fighter, and forge a new political programme. He wanted to become a full-time revolutionary.

Now Taaki is back — in Europe, if not in the UK, where the police won’t leave him alone — and he wants to take bitcoin back. Over the last three years, while Taaki was busy toting kalashnikovs and studying sociology tomes, the cryptocurrency he helped build changed profoundly. Its price rose from $200 in March 2015 to over $19,000 in December 2017, before falling back to today’s $10,000. The crowd associated with it transmogrified from a cluster of libertarians, idealist techies, and darknet dwellers, to a hodgepodge of day-traders, Lamborghini buffs, and token-peddling chancers.

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What’s more, Taaki says, the technology’s politically incendiary potential has faded. “Bitcoin doesn't have any vision behind it, any vision of where it's going,” he told me. “All the original ideas about using bitcoin for challenging power — or privacy, or new forms of economic systems — are falling by the wayside. Now it's simply a small community obsessed with the price going up.”

In Taaki’s opinion, bitcoin — like most of today’s technologies, from personal computers to social media — has become a toy, a tool that is inane at best and oppressive at worst.

Reclaiming it will require an ideology, a set of strong principles channelling bitcoin towards political ends. And Taaki has found that ideology in the depths of the Syrian conflict.

Amir Taaki poses with a Kalashnikov in Syria Amir Taaki

If you want to understand Amir Taaki, you first have to understand Abdullah Öcalan. The founder of Kurdistan Workers' Party, Öcalan fought for decades against Turkey with the aim of creating a Kurdish state. He was eventually captured by Turkish intelligence in 1998, and he has since been confined on the island-jail of İmralı. From there, he developed a doctrine that rejects the idea of nation state and promotes the emergence of self-governing, environmentalist, feminist, direct-democratic local communities. Öcalan’s theory formed the blueprint for Rojava’s model of government, the one that mesmerised Taaki to the point that he took up arms to defend it. He called his vision democratic confederalism.

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According to Öcalan’s doctrine, communities breaking out from a nation state can theoretically achieve independence through peaceful means. But they can resort to any means — including violence — if a state or hostile actor (in Rojava’s case, Turkey or Isis) threaten their freedom.

That’s where bitcoin enters the picture: Taaki thinks that the cryptocurrency can be the catalyst for the global spread of democratic confederalism. First of all, bitcoin would allow communities such as Rojava to exchange money and goods outside of the purview of states and financial authorities. (At just seven transactions per second, the network is still too slow to power large communities, which is why Taaki set scalability as one of the early goals for his dojo.) But Taaki envisions many possible uses for blockchain technology: his manifesto mentions decentralised messaging systems, digital governance applications, and online black markets — ”Like a new Silk Road, but one we're not liable for,” he says.

Taaki’s monk-hackers will initially develop these projects — alongside non-cryptocurrency-related initiatives, such as mobile telephone networks, open-source software, sustainable industrial technology — with the aim of supporting the beleaguered Rojava community, with which Taaki is still in touch. But that is just the beginning of Taaki’s master plan. Which brings us back to Catalonia.

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Spending time with Taaki, one realises that he has two distinct modes of carrying himself. When on a stage, or giving a sit-down interview, he speaks in chapters and verses, rattling out references to Mao and Lenin, Ada Lovelace and Lewis Mumford, defining basic words and concepts (“state”; “violence”; “hierarchy”) as they are mentioned, and embarking on disquisitions from first principles. In informal situations, he is friendly but fiercely laconic, and he loves to lure his interlocutors into self-contradiction.

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Now, Taaki is in the latter mode. He is standing outside a bar near the event venue, surrounded by a small crowd of people who attended his talk. It is an unusually cold evening in Barcelona, and those who are not holding a beer keep their hands stuffed in their pockets. Taaki is not drinking; he is munching a banana he fished out of a cardboard box half-full with a bundle of conference handouts.

He was here when during the Catalan independence referendum, and the post-referendum turmoil, he says. But he did not take part in the street squabbles: they were unworthy of his energy. Catalans were not really ready to put their lives on the line.

“The whole thing was a joke. A couple of Catalan friends of mine got out and joined the protest, really believing that a revolution was about to happen,” Taaki says. “Two hours later they were drunk and they went home to have sex. And then [Catalan president] Puigdemont flying to Brussels, running away like a coward. What sort of message did that send?”

A woman nearby accuses him of “reductionism”. A Catalan man in his thirties, the face covered with thick stubble, makes the case against independence by appealing to our shared humanity: people have more in common than things dividing them.

“What do you share with Isis? What do you have in common?” Taaki asks calmly. The Catalan bumbles. Taaki grins.

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For all his skepticism about October’s disorders, Taaki still thinks there is something brewing in Catalonia, something worth his energy. Originally, he planned to launch his revolutionary hacker operation in Greece — but when he looked closer he realised the Greek bitcoin community was negligible. Catalonia’s scene was more developed, if not huge; plus, the region’s political tumult presented a great testing ground for Taaki’s ideological fervour and technical skills.

Is he trying to engineer Catalonia’s independence? I ask. The answer’s complicated.

He has met up with some pro-independence organisations, and with people working with Barcelona en Comú, a citizen platform launched by mayor Ada Colau and inspired by the ideas of Murray Bookchin — a philosopher Taaki admires. Not much came out of it (“They probably thought I was just a crazy Brit”), although Taaki is still interested in working with and within those groups.

The main problem is that, for most Catalans, independence means creating a new nation state; Taaki thinks states should be obliterated in favour of a global swarm of self-governing communities à-la Rojava.

If Catalans wanted to achieve that kind of model, then Taaki and his five-people army will be there to provide technical and ideological ammunition. For instance, he says, adopting cryptocurrency would allow the Catalans to stop paying taxes to the Spanish state. And the blockchain might be used to create a secure digital voting system to rerun the referendum without the interference of truncheon-wielding gendarmes.

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Wouldn’t that anger Spain’s central government, and elicit its reaction (regardless of any subtlety on nationhood and state)? Taaki nods. “Yeah, I hope so. And the Europeans’. And other governments’.”

Independence protesters wave Catalan flags as they demonstrate against the Spanish government in October, 2017. Taaki calls the protest "a joke" Sean Gallup/Getty Images

The day after his talk, I meet Taaki at AureaSocial, a squat near Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia, where he currently occupies a three-by-two meter room on the second floor. He is still wearing the same black outfit as last night, only this time without the beret. We walk to a nearby park. I have a question for him, something that still eludes me after listening to his talk: What would Catalonia look like if his plan succeeded?

He pauses, thinking. “First of all, there would be a very strong rural movement of agricultural producers. There would be strong local and national identity in culture and fashion. People would organise politically, democratically at a local level.”

“Freedom is the ability to satisfy our needs at a local level. As long as Catalans keep eating McDonald's, buying clothes from H&M, watching MTV, they won't be free.”

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Taaki’s vision is not something you usually come across among the most politicised fringes of the bitcoin community. Cryptocurrency tends to appeal to libertarian Davos Men — think of “Bitcoin Jesus” Roger Ver: US-born, Saint Kitts and Nevis’ citizen, Japan-resident — who see bitcoin as a ticket for personal, taxless, freedom. For them, blockchain is a hammer for smashing centralised power (financial, administrative, commercial) and give it back to individuals criss-crossing a globalised world; for Taaki, the hammer should be used to smash globalisation and bring about a loose federation of regional, culture-based communities.

The way he sees it, “neoliberal globalism” is destroying local identities, flattening cultural differences, and muffling dissenting opinions through technology-enforced filter bubbles. “We are living the last days of the second version of the Roman Empire,” Taaki says. The Empire that, his theory goes, collapsed because of multiculturalism and lack of unifying values.

There are glaring points of contact between Taaki’s analysis of modernity and the worldview of thinkers on the far-right. Taaki says that’s because far-righters are onto something.

“When I see [white nationalist] Richard Spencer I think that a lot of the things he says are true — he is not a stupid guy,” he says. “People in the west have to engage with these ideas, not ignore them. There are some elements of truth in the critique the far right is making.”

But Spencer and his ilk are hell-bent on creating a “centralised fascist state” with a racist ideology, whereas he aims at facing neoliberalism’s shortcomings with grassroot democracy and culture. Hence Taaki’s urgency. He believes democratic confederalism is the West’s last chance against the onslaught of the dark forces of Islamism and far-right extremism.

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“As I told the police when they arrested me in England: it's in their interest to support my work or other bigger forces will rise up in Europe,” he says. “And, unlike those forces, I am on a side that doesn't seek open conflict with the state. We should start a conversation.”

The most important conversation, though, is probably going to happen within the bitcoin universe itself. Taaki’s objective is to make sure that bitcoin is weaponised, rather than being the butt of endless sports cars jokes, “hodling” chants and Wolf-of-Wall-Street-like chicanery. Today’s bitcoiners — the politically cynical or oblivious ones, rather than the libertarians, who could even enjoy the intellectual duel — are doomed to be the first casualties of Taaki’s crusade. They are the ones who are convinced the world, and themselves, that bitcoin is an unusual asset class at best, and a financial hazard at worst. Taaki is out to to show everyone that it’s much more powerful and dangerous.

As I write this, Taaki is in the process of recruiting the first five members of his academy: they will have to relinquish any other responsibility or commitment, undergo a period of “ideology training”, and live an ascetic life in the property Taaki will rent. There will be no salary other than “participation in historic action”. Over time, Taaki plans to open other chapters around the world — specifically in politically fractious regions such as India’s Kerala, Mexico, and Argentina.

Should we take this whole thing 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.


As a bitcoin early adopter, Taaki is likely to have enough money to fund his project, and he carries significant clout among core developers and ideologues. Plus, he has the motivation, the relentless, destiny-driven drive of the true revolutionary.

I ask Taaki what would make him waver. “Death,” he replies. Whose death? “My own death. I derive my power from my own death.”

UPDATE (8 March 2017): This piece has been changed to clarify that Amir Taaki is looking for male and female recruits for his "dojo", not solely female as may have accidentally been implied.