Amir Taaki Interview

Following on from our recent article on Amir Taaki, we now publish a writeup of an interview with Amir. The interview covers three sections, Ethereum (The early time in Barcelona), Syria and Bitcoin.

Part 1 – Ethereum & Barcelona

• Where did you live in Barcelona in 2014 and who did you live with?

There was a project in Catalonia. There was an anarchist movement there, in relation to the independence movement. There was a project called the Catalan Integral Cooperativa, we were working with that. They had a project to create their own village, it was an industrial factory complex. The aim was to create an internal market system whereby people could live outside the state. They had a project Calafou which was a proto-network state. One of the things they had was a hack lab and we were part of that. We were working on Darkwallet. A lot of people lived there, Vitalik Buterin lived there for over a year with us and was a co-founder of Darkwallet. A Lot of other early Ethereum founders were there, like Mihai Alisie. They asked me to join Ethereum, but I couldn’t see a strong usecase and was too busy with Bitcoin dev. Vitalik says this time had a big impact on Ethereum. Vitalik mentions it in this video with me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daHI1F-rR0k.

• Were you disappointed that Ethereum quickly abandoned its anarchists roots and sucked up to corporates quite quickly (e.g. The Ethereum Enterprise Alliance)?

I didn’t follow Ethereum much again until 2018, therefore I cannot really comment on this. Ethereum took a lot of money from Consensys, JP Morgan and also Soros and WEF type people. This path allowed them to get where they are. But some of them are feeling buyers remorse, like they sacrificed their souls. That is why they are now talking about a “North Star” and to make Ethereum cypherpunk again. But they want it both ways. They are up against competition from Solana. Solana doesn’t want to make the world a better place like Ethereum, Solana are just ruthless business people.

• Isn’t the L2 strategy a smart long term move for Ethereum? L2 transaction volume is booming.

Ethereum is fragmented, there isn’t much of a strategy, so you cannot really call it a strategy. Solana is also doing the L2 stuff too. Ethereum Core is disconnected from the wider Ethereum ecosystem. The Ethereum Core people are a little bit socialist and into academia, therefore they don’t even like the DeFi stuff. Everytime I go to an academic conference, probably half the people say they work for the Ethereum Foundation, it is a massive organisation with massive scale. There are all sorts of people, even sociologists. Ethereum is more wishy washy.

On the other hand Ethereum 2.0 took a massive amount of energy and that worked. They then did a big victory lap. Now they are on to ZK proofs and that does really solve the scaling trilema, but this kind of work is more than 10x Ethereum 2.0, so an unprecedented amount of scale and work. Will they make that? Will it take 10 years? Maybe they should be focusing less on long term speculative research. Even though the research is very good and helps cryptography in general, it’s a public good. But does this massive expenditure help Ethereum? Everybody benefits, so are they really capturing that value? That is why the VC side of Ethereum is getting anxious.

Part 2 – Syria

• What inspired you to go?

I went there thinking I would probably die. I was reading about Rojava on the internet. It’s a lot of very libertarian ideals, like a decentralised economy. When ISIS attacked, I just felt I could not sit back and let it happen. I would have been a hypocrite had I not gone. If I did not go, I could have taken over as the lead in Bitcoin. The Blocksize debate started with the Darkwallet and was heating up. I left the Blocksize War and went to Syria. I was in Syria for nearly two years. I then went back to Syria for the full year of 2019. The war was over by 2019 and there was no fighting. Trump said he was leaving Syria, so I went back to help.

• Might you go back to Syria?

I don’t know, it depends what happens.

• What dates in the UK were you under house arrest? What were you charged with?

I was under house arrest for one year in the UK. I was out on bail and had to be in the house in the day and was not allowed to go to other places. I had to check into the police station regularly. I had a curfew. I was studying philosophy at that time. I had Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The police were concerned about Syria.

20% of ex-YPG have been charged in the UK, while only 3% of ISIS has been charged by the UK police. Why is that? After one year, the police dropped the case. Everytime after that, when I returned to the UK they would arrest me and question me for eight hours about everything in my life, so eventually I decided not to come back to the UK.

• Is the fall of Assad and rise of groups more affiliated to Turkey bad news for the YPG? Will the YPG survive?

I don’t know.

Part 3 – Bitcoin

• Why did you say “Bitcoin XT is a conspiracy being pushed by malevolent powers”?

The small block guys asked me to support the small blockers. I did support the small blockers because of who it was, it was very obvious that the small blockers were on the right side and the large blockers were on the wrong side. However, it was a political issue, not a technical one.

However, the small blockers went about it the wrong way, there should have been “proper governance”, instead of shutting the large blockers down. There should have been a wide discussion and debate, it was not only a technical issue. You did not need to be a computer science genius to join the debate.

However, the large blocker attempt was a hostile coup attempt.

• You have recently criticised Bitcoin Core, you say they have: i. Too much focus on MSTR, ii. A lack of leadership, and iii. Abandonment of libertarian roots. Why are the Bitcoin Core devs responsible or the cause of any of that? They play a relatively small but important role in the ecosystem, fixing bugs, improving transaction selection algos etc

People say to me, Amir: “what would it take to come back to Bitcoin?” I tell them as follows:

1. Bitcoin should be based on a formal specification, there should be a formal standards organisation with formal defined roles and everything should be completely specified. Whenever you say that to Bitcoin developers, they say that Bitcoin relies on un-specified standards in C++. However, C++ is fully specified, except undefined behaviour. What they are saying is they are relying on undefined behavior in C++. That is fucking crazy!
2. Why should there be an official Bitcoin node software? There should be no official node software! Why does one team have a special status? There should be a free market and standards organisation with proper governance.

• There is no “official” node software.

Yeah but there is. People say it’s the official one. It is listed as the official one. It is the one on GitHub forward slash Bitcoin.

• How do we get to client diversity, as during the period of transition from one node to a diverse set of clients, will there not be significant risk of an unexpected chain split?

As soon as “official status” is abandoned, there will be a whole bunch of nodes spin up. If you really want safety, people should run multiple systems. If they do not agree, you just stop.

• How can you just stop? Bitcoin is running 24×7 and large businesses are depending on it being up. Like ETF providers and derivatives platforms etc

I agree. That is a risk. But you have to balance that against the risk of there being one dominant node and one team. If you have 2 nodes, each with a 50% share, those nodes will be very well vetted. If there is a split, people will follow the specification, they may need to turn a node off and upgrade.

• What if the split happens at 4am in the night and I don’t wake up until 11am. My node will not upgrade and won’t follow the specification. Peter Todd is correct, the software supercedes a written specification.

Clients can be written such that a chance of a deviation from the specification is unlikely. There can be an inefficient but robust and separate part of the code that verifies the blocks. This part of the code can be verified formally. This is the standard across computer science and other crypto coins. Bitcoin should do this.

• You really want a formal governance structure? Will that not just become corrupt? Wouldn’t you be fighting against that?

Well we need some process. Now we have the BIP process. The reason I made that process was that whenever I tried to contribute, Gavin Andresen would block me. He would have some excuse. Gavin obviously had issues and wouldn’t allow me to contribute. I gave a talk in Amsterdam in 2011. The first public presentation on Bitcoin. After this, Gavin DM’d me and said that I should not be allowed to talk on Bitcoin ever again. It was very much that kind of vibe. Gavin saw Bitcoin as his startup project. This is why I created the BIP process.

People say a standards organisation is not very anarchic. But Bitcoin has a shadow governance, it’s just not very visible. These people do not think they are corrupt, but they are. The people in Bitcoin Core, in power, have not kept up with the crypto industry, because they are not under competition.

• Do you agree that Bitcoin Core cannot harfork on their own?

I don’t know.

• Do you agree that greater client diversity makes protocol changes harder, not easier?

Yes I do agree. That is an advantage of client diversity. If you have to convince 4 of 5 teams to do a protocol rule change, that also adds legitimacy to the protocol rule change, rather than it being just one team.

• Why can’t the innovation, leadership and vision come from outside of Bitcoin Core? That is how I see the future of Bitcoin.

It can’t. I am a systems developer. I want to do new cryptography. There is a lot I want to do with the base layer, new ways of spending Bitcoin. We need to do things like add privacy, make a full sync much faster and make a fully validating mobile wallet. The Core devs are also incompetent. The software code has barely changed since 2011. It is a decaying and rotten architecture. It doesn’t allow innovation to happen.

If I went to GitHub, I am not in the right political clique so they would reject me. There is propaganda against other nodes, like Eric Voskuil’s client. Eric is a talented developer. Bitcoin Core people have blocked him from funding with propaganda. That is corruption. When Erik’s software had bugs, the Core devs came out with their knives.

• Who is the corrupt leadership? The people you complain about are not the current main contributors to Bitcoin Core.

Ok, maybe you are right. Maybe the people have changed. Maybe it’s a new generation. But it’s still corrupt. The new devs are still the legacy of the old developers and still influenced by the old developers.

• The idea for a standards body sounds a bit like what the large blockers were saying in the blocksize war. There was a huge amount of debate on this. Had you gone through that, your views may have evolved differently and you might not want a standards body. Do you really want a foundation?

I do not want a foundation, but a standards body. In the first public video on Bitcoin, in May 2011, I suggested a foundation to Gavin and then a week later Gavin started saying we need a Bitcoin Foundation. So I obviously inspired him into that:

• Don’t we want nobody in power? That is the point of Bitcoin. No leadership and no decision making body. Maybe we haven’t achieved that, but should we not at least aim for that?

There is always someone in power. We don’t have transparency now. Better that we have a transparent process.

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