Amir Taaki

• His street cred includes founding one of the earliest Bitcoin exchanges, an early version of a development foundation, and instituted the now ubiquitous Bitcoin Improvement Protocols (BIPs)
• Britcoin, founder -> became Intersango, principal developer
• Bitcoin Consultancy, co-founder
• Libbitcoin, creator, it was the first alternative Bitcoin implementation
• Electrum, worked on the client
• Darkmarket -> forked into OpenBazaar
• Autonomous Polytechnics; founder, announced in 2018, Taaki is still looking (12-2019) for more funding. "Slowly, but it’s been going. We’re now nearly finished. I need another $40,000. I’m trying to find the right people to put [it] down. We have a whole bunch of projects and events next year to prepare for."

• Dark Wallet, co-founder
• Kind of difficult to determine but could be called a small blocker/core supporter due to them having better developers, however later on got more and more sour with Core.

• He more or less vanished a couple of years ago (2019), making his way to Kurd occupied Syria, commonly known as Rojava. Taaki told almost no one of his plans, and spent nearly four months serving in the unrecognized nation’s army. He emerged clearly changed by the experience, embracing more formal political arrangements through a regional guru, and even began praising religion. Upon his return to England, he was arrested and sentenced to a year of monitoring by local authorities, which included most of his computer equipment being confiscated and a GPS ankle monitor affixed to his body. Once off monitoring, Taaki left for Spain, ending up part of the uprising for independence in Catalonia.
• From an interview with CoinDesk (24-12-2019):

"One of the first programmers to work on the bitcoin source code, Taaki split from the group of core developers to build the first independent implementation of bitcoin. Libbitcoin was intended as a springboard for a new community of cryptographers organized around a set of ideals.

He moved to Calafou, an autonomous post-capitalist colony in Catalonia, Spain, and started a hacklab. It’s here Taaki incubated a number of projects, including Bitcoin Magazine, and upstart coders, like ethereum’s creator Vitalik Buterin. 

• His relation with Vitalik has been difficult since then however. From CoinDesk (10-2019):  

"Taaki recounted approaching both ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin and Parity Technologies founder Gavin Wood for financial support [for his political projects].
Buterin’s response to Taaki’s ask of a $25,000 donation for training new cryptocurrency developers was ambiguous, according to Taaki. Taaki said Wood suggested he apply for funding through an official grants program.
Viewing the grants process as cumbersome and “bureaucratic,” Taaki seemed to take personal offense at the responses and called out the two on the Devcon stage for having “low social intelligence.” 

Both Buterin and Wood were contacted to confirm this story though neither has responded as of press time. We will update the piece if we hear back."

 Which did not happen as of 2-2020.