Amir Taaki is a British-Iranian programmer and one of the first five Bitcoin developers, active since 2010. His early work focused on privacy: he wrote the first implementations of CoinJoin and stealth addresses and created libbitcoin, a high-performance Bitcoin implementation. He founded the UK's first Bitcoin exchange, organised some of the earliest Bitcoin conferences, and authored BIP 0001, which established the Bitcoin Improvement Proposal process. With Cody Wilson and Vitalik Buterin he co-founded the pioneering privacy wallet DarkWallet, a project that influenced several early Ethereum founders. Alongside two decades of free-software work and a period of anarchist activism across Europe, he now builds DarkFi, a layer-1 blockchain for anonymous applications.
In 2013, a teenage Vitalik Buterin moved into Calafou, an anarchist cooperative outside Barcelona, to code alongside Amir Taaki — Bitcoin's first prominent developer, Dark Wallet creator, and the man who turned down the job of Ethereum's lead developer. The ideas born in that hac…
