Abstract: In this piece we cover Bitcoin legend Amir Taaki. We speculate on what impact Amir could have had on the Blocksize War, had he not decided to fight for Rojava, arguing that Amir may have been an influential small blocker. We comment on Amir’s recent criticism of what he sees as the corrupt established powers in Bitcoin, including Bitcoin Core. We look at the recent adoption by Amir of some of the large blocker talking points from the war. We conclude by asserting that Amir is a consistent idealist and true radical, who fights against what he perceives as the entrenched powers.
Criticism of the Bitcoin Powers That be
Amir Taaki recently posted the following:
instead what we have now is small block Bitcoin communism. The people in charge are doing a shit job and should be fired. Bitcoin needs new forward looking leadership. I long left the community in anger over the cringey influencers squatting on Bitcoin.
Lightning and everything Core has done is a complete failure. Roger [Ver] said this would happen and it did. They have shut down independent small dev teams and centralized power.
Source: https://x.com/Narodism/status/1866872178722935059
These posts may not be especially noteworthy to most people in the Bitcoin space today. People post this kind of criticism all the time and the messaging in the criticism is close to the narrative of the “large blockers” from the Blocksize War, which was waged from August 2015 to November 2017, before a crushing defeat for the larger blockers. However, in our view it is worth evaluating this critique, at least because of who is saying it. Amir is a true Bitcoin veteran. Mr Amir Taaki was perhaps one of the most important, significant and influential people in Bitcoins history, at least in the 2010 to 2013 era. Remember, Bitcoin was much smaller back then and therefore individual characters could be more significant. Amir was deeply involved in the space in that period, arranging conferences and events, discussing technical issues, working on Bitcoin code, launching and running businesses and above all, promoting Bitcoin in the media, with a unique, engaging and charismatic style. Amir demonstrated significant charismatic and visionary leadership skills, appealing to a somewhat niche libertarian, anarchic and anti-establishment audience. In a way, after around 2014, Amir was replaced by Andreas Antonopoulos as one of the key influential speakers in the space. Andreas also had a stint of around three years in that position.
Idealists vs Entrepreneurs
In the 2011 to 2013 period, there was somewhat of a small and subtle schism developing under the surface, that only finally crystallised as the Blocksize War started in the summer of 2015. This was certainly not a major schism in the period and it’s hard to precisely characterise it. We will choose a framing of “Idealists vs Entrepreneurs”, because these are the words that some people used at the time. The idealists were more politically minded and sometimes saw Bitcoin as an underground tool to help bring down corrupt established powers such as banks, central banks and governments and give people the ability to avoid financial censorship. At the time, those with these kinds of visions were sometimes centered around the Bitcoin community in Europe and the UK. Amir was certainly in this group, an idealist. The entrepreneurs were seen as more centered in the United States and Silicon valley, with perhaps Gavin Andresen a key player here, along with Mike Hearn. The entrepreneurs were focused on building businesses, payments, the technology and the VC industry.
As an example, in October 2014 a Bitcoin payment startup Bitnet, announced it had raised $14.5m, a huge amount of money for the space back then. Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten participated in the round. Bitnet’s CEO was John McDonnell, and he touted his experience at Visa and in-depth knowledge of credit card payment systems as a key selling point. Bitnet was to somehow use Bitcoin or Bitcoin technology to make payments better by augmenting credit card systems, which struggled with slow payments, high fees and chargebacks. John McDonnell positioned himself as an experienced serious businessman in a suit, selling to large enterprises. Bitnet was to help move Bitcoin on to the next stage, away from its childish anarchist past. One can imagine that Amir was not a particularly big fan of this. In our view, cultural and political issues aside, using Bitcoin to augment credit card systems to solve various problems in the credit card industry did not make technical sense. For this reason, Bitnet eventually failed.
Another even more clear example is Jeremy Allaire’s and his company Circle, which raised $9m in November 2013, again with the goal of taking Bitcoin mainstream as a payment technology. Mike Hearn was on the Circle advisory board. In a January 2014 Coindesk article on Mr Allaire, it said:
But to make this transition, bitcoin is having to change. No longer the preserve of radical libertarians, bitcoin is beginning to be dominated by a different kind of animal: the suited businessman. And with Wall Street-types not far behind, the anti-government ideals held by certain parts of the bitcoin community are being rejected and disowned. Bitcoin is beginning to hit the mainstream, but it’s tidying itself up first.
Allaire is blunt about the transition bitcoin is going through, saying it’s “absolutely” moving away from its libertarian roots.
Amir was probably so incensed by this, he made a video rejecting this narrative from Circle, about Bitcoin staying “true to its roots”. Amir’s positioning was clear, Bitcoin should remain true to its libertarian roots and Amir was against the men in suits trying to take over Bitcoin.
After many more funding rounds, Circle eventually succeeded as the provider of the stablecoin USDC.
The Blocksize War Vs Syrian Civil War
In August 2015, the Blocksize War started, with Gavin Andresen and Mike Hearn supporting Bitcoin XT. It came along with a letter of support from the Bitcoin industry, in a letter signed by VC backed companies such as BitPay, Blockchain.info, Circle, Bitnet, Xapo and Bitgo. Given Amir’s position, as a leading idealist, not a fan of the men in suits, or Gavin and Mike for that matter, one might think that he could have been leading the opposition to BitcoinXT. Amir is likely to have been very effective, with his charismatic fighting style and charisma. However, Amir was nowhere to be seen.
In February 2015, six months prior to this, Amir had flown from Madrid to Iraq. Amir had chosen to fight in a very different war, a much more real one. Amir joined the so-called “People’s Defense Units” (AKA the YPG), a libertarian socialist, US-backed Kurdish militant group in Syria. The group aims to defend an autonomous region in North East Syria called Rojava. The group are regarded by the Turkish government as terrorists. Amir had proven that his radical talk was not just bluster, he was the real deal, a true political radical that he claimed to be. Amir fought in the fight against ISIS.
Fortunately Amir survived in Syria and returned to London in May 2016. Although the Blocksize War was still waging, Amir never truly participated. The war was so intense by that point and largely vendetta driven, such that the initial ideological battle lines barely mattered. It was very difficult to work out what was going on and slot in, after missing almost the first year of the war. Besides, until near the end of the Blocksize war in late 2017, Amir was under house arrest at his mothers home in East England, with the British police questioning him about ISIS. Amir also suffered from PTSD and he clearly had other priorities.
Amir’s Views on the Blocksize War
We do not think we are being too speculative by asserting that Amir would have been a small blocker, indeed he has spelled it out in recent interviews. For instance in 2022, on the “Bitcoin Takeover” podcast, Amir said the following:
A lot of the ideas that are big discussions today, if you actually go back into Bitcoin’s roots you can see it starting very early, the seeds were there of those ideas. For example the idea of Bitcoin being immutable technology, that came out the first initial conflict in Bitcoin’s history, which on one side was Gavin Andresen and Mike Hearn and there clique or their cronies at the Bitcoin Foundation, which were business guys that were trying to assert power over Bitcoin. And then on the other side was like LukeJr, myself and other people, which had a different perspective. The corporate perspective was that Bitcoin is a payments technology, that it would augment credit cards and banks. They were into big money, institutions, mass adoption, ect. Where as our side, which is the more idealistic side, we were like Bitcoin is not for buying coffee. Bitcoin is like a new form of money, that is what we said. Those guys saw Bitcoin as a product, the product has to be mass adopted, it has to be user friendly. Payments have to be cheap etc. Whereas on our side, we are like it’s not a product, it’s a network, it’s a technology, it’s open source software.
Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=9mdTS_Gyg7o
In another interview, Amir explicitly said something like he would have been on the small block side, since Peter Todd was a small blocker and he trusted Peter Todd. Amir also said that “Bitcoin XT is a conspiracy being pushed by malevolent powers”, some time in 2015. So with these quotes in mind, it’s pretty clear where Amir would have stood.
It is also worth pointing out that referring to the small blockers as the original Bitcoiners, the idealists and libertarians, while referring to the large blockers as attempting a corporate takeover of Bitcoin is a small block framing of the conflict. The large blockers, most notably staunch large blocker Roger Ver, would refute this. Roger would claim that it’s the large blockers that are the original Bitcoiners and libertarians, while the small blockers were all newbies. Whatever one’s views are here, it is not necessarily pertinent to this essay. Our point is that in late 2015, Amir would have seen the large blockers as attempting a corporate takeover of Bitcoin. Whether that was the case or not. Alternatively, one could use the quote from Jeremy Allaire about “transitioning from libertarian roots” as evidence that Roger Ver is wrong and the large block camp consisted of many newbies.
The above being said, we do think Amir shares a lot with the large blockers, especially on technological issues, with their philosophy on experimentation/risk taking/flexibility and with the large blocker view on “leadership”. In contrast, small blockers can be thought of as more conservative with the Bitcoin protocol. Therefore it is a more complex picture than one might think. However, for the cultural and political reasons mentioned above it is very difficult to see how Amir would have been anything other than a small blocker, at the start of the Blocksize War. And in our view, given Amir’s charisma, strength of character and perseverance, he might have had a significant impact on the war. However, for the reasons mentioned above, as the war progressed and as the characters involved changed, Amir may well have switched sides to some extent. We will never know.
Amir’s story is not just about Bitcoin. There is also the irony of Amir’s association with Ethereum and its own libertarian and radical roots. Roots Ethereum seemed to abandon pretty fast with initiatives such as the Ethereum Enterprise Alliance. In 2014 Amir lived in a squat in Barcelona with many of the people that went on to found Ethereum, such as Vitalik Buterin. The tech group was based in an area that supported the Catalonia independence cause.
Therefore, one can also ask similar questions about the Ethereum ecosystem. Had Amir not gone to Syria, would he have been an Etherean rather than a Bitcoiner? What impact would Amir have had on the DAO wars? Would Amir have opposed the DAO hardfork? How disenfranchised would Amir have been as Ethereum quickly abandoned its radical roots? These questions are for another day.
Who Are The Idealists Now?
The Blocksize War is ancient history and Amir is back. Amir is now pointing the finger at Bitcoin Core and the corrupt established Bitcoin powers that be. Amir now claims Roger Ver was perhaps somewhat correct and that Bitcoin Core “lacks leadership” and doesn’t have a decision making process, key and longstanding claim of the larger blockers. One could say this makes Amir seem a bit inconsistent, given what he said about BitcoinXT in 2015. However, interestingly, we do not see Amir as being inconsistent. If anything Amir is the same Amir he always has been. Amir is still fighting for the future of Bitcoin, a libertarian Bitcoin, Bitcoin as a tool for freedom, to help empower the vulnerable and bring down powerful and corrupt institutions. If Amir sees any powerful or established organisation, he begins to think they may be corrupt.
What has changed is the landscape. The old entrepreneurs from 2013 are mostly irrelevant now. Gavin and Mike are gone. So any personal animosity between Amir and them is irrelevant. In terms of the entrepreneurs, or the corporates, what we have now makes 2013 look like nothing in comparison. The small blockers won, mega institutions are adopting Bitcoin and the large blockers are irrelevant and sidelined. The large blockers are therefore ignored by the financial institutions.
We have one of the largest asset management companies in the world, target of a plethora of lunatic anti-establishment conspiracy theories, Blackrock, as a leading Bitcoin ETF issuer. In the first year Blackrock has taken in almost $40bn of inflow and is selling Bitcoin to institutions and boomers worldwide, with many in the space excitingly cheering them on. However, Larry Fink has nothing in common with Amir and the idealists.
And of course there is Microstrategy and the ridiculous Bitcoin as a corporate treasury asset idea, including the ponzi like element of it, Bitcoin as a “yield treasury” asset. With Microstrategy’s CEO Michael Saylor advocating various positions Amir would oppose, such as avoiding protocol changes and taking a very conservative stance with respect to Bitcoin technology. In Amir’s mind, the opposite is true, Bitcoin needs radical charismatic visionary libertarian leadership to take risks and ensure Bitcoin continues to improve, change and evolve.
So as Amir “comes back”, what is he to do? Is Amir going to jump on the Microstrategy bandwagon and tell people to buy the stock at a 120% premium to NAV? Is he going to join David Bailey and try to get Trump or the Emirate royals to launch Bitcoin strategic reserve funds? Is he going to join Fidelity in the Digital Asset team as a sales director? Is Amir going to join Nayib Bukele’s Bitcoin advisory panel as a consultant? Is Amir going to join the CME to help them structure their next crypto derivative product? Of course he is fucking not! Amir is going to oppose whatever these people and organisations are doing and anyone he thinks is associated with them. Amir is going to join anyone who opposes these establishment institutions. Amir needs to find the idealists. The people who want more privacy, more grassroots user adoption, libertarianism politics, radical change and risk taking, the heterodox contrarians in the space. Who fits that bill? Roger Ver…
Bitcoin Core
Amir now wants to fire the developers, a common mantra from the larger blockers and largely nonsensical (You can only fire someone if you pay them and nobody is forcing you to run the open source code they wrote). This is an area we want to pushback on Amir. Amir’s apparent lumping in of Bitcoin Core with the “corrupt powers” and institutions in the space, which he sees as part of the problems in the space. Bitcoin Core may have several problems, but probably not the same problems as the ones Microstrategy and Blackrock may be causing. The current Core team probably have a lot more in common with Amir than they do with Michael Saylor or Larry Fink. Bitcoin Core is still largely composed of idealists. And although almost all members of the Bitcoin Core team are paid/sponsored, there is almost no financial relationship between the institutions Amir cites as problems and Bitcoin Core. Indeed Saylor in particular seems to have a problem with Bitcoin Core. Bitcoin Core developers are still paid quite modestly. In our view they are not likely to be corrupt or complacent due to their payments from Brink, OpenSats, Chaincode, Block Inc, the HRF or Maelstrom.fund.
The way we see it is that Bitcoin Core is doing an important technical role, of slow improvements to the software, while also fixing bugs and keeping the network stable and reliable. Although, we appreciate that the conservative stance Core takes with many issues may not be to Amir’s liking.
Charismatic Visionary Leadership
Amir and others see one of the problems with Bitcoin Core as lacking leadership. However, we do not see it as a necessary part of the Bitcoin Core team’s role to be visionary leaders in the space and to help answer questions such as what is Bitcoin for or what should Bitcoin be? They can participate if they want to of course, but I do not see why we want to burden people fixing bugs, implementing encryption in the P2P network, building a new GUI, managing the releases or making the memory pool work properly with other leadership duties. We need this technical work done, so we should probably support these developers as best as we can. Demanding that they are charismatic is probably not sensible. However, the Core development team should not be immune from criticism. It is just that we do not agree that blaming the developers for lacking leadership or becoming MSTR analysts is the correct criticism.
Of course, we also do not want leaders either. Bitcoin is a bottom up grass roots user controlled money. Nobody should be the leader and we should all rebel against the leader. If there was a leader of Bitcoin, Amir would be the first to take up arms in the rebellion against the leader. Therefore, asking for leadership may be a bit misguided. But the closest thing we have to a leader right now is probably Mr Saylor. It might be good if different voices to Saylor gained traction and influence to some extent. Who that might be we do not know. But Amir is at least someone to listen to, to some extent anyway.
Politically, conservatism or conservative libertarianism now seems a more dominant philosophy within Bitcoin, rather than radical underground libertarianism. You may hear today that Bitcoin was never about radical anti-establishment politics. Bitcoin was always about getting mainstream adoption from large financial institutions, it’s just that we do not want those established institutions to be able to mess with the underlying protocol rules. However, there has never been unity among Bitcoiners about what Bitcoin is, what it is for and how it will evolve. To Amir, it was always about radicalism and idealism. In our view, a degree of tension about what Bitcoin is for can be healthy. The entrepreneurs, business types and institutional investors now seem to have the ascendancy, a bit more balance could be a positive.
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