Quick Summary
- Amir Taaki, one of Bitcoin’s earliest contributors, says Singaporean police questioned him for six hours on Tuesday and then deported him from the country.
- He says the questions were about “what I work on” — his privacy work. Not a charge. Not an accusation. Just the work.
- In the past year alone he was also deported from Argentina and Mexico, and detained in Serbia and Japan.
- Taaki wrote BIP 0001 — the document that created Bitcoin’s own improvement process. He wrote the first implementations of CoinJoin and stealth addresses, created libbitcoin, and founded the UK’s first Bitcoin exchange.
- He says he is “on a list” but cannot find out which country put him there. Every time he asks, he is told it was “just a random check.”
- He now builds DarkFi, a crypto privacy protocol. That is what he was asked about for six hours.
Amir Taaki posted this selfie from the room where Singaporean police questioned him for six hours before deporting him on October 6, 2026. Photo: Amir Taaki, via Bitcoin Magazine.
Source: Bitcoin Magazine — “Bitcoin Privacy Legend Amir Taaki Deported From Singapore” by Mathew Di Salvo, October 6, 2026.
What Happened
On Tuesday, October 6, Amir Taaki posted from a white room.
Six hours of questioning by Singaporean police, then a deportation. He described the subject matter in a single line: “Everything about what I work on.”
No charge was filed. No court was involved. No lawyer was needed because there was nothing to defend. He was simply asked what he builds, held long enough to make the point, and put on a plane.
His own words, posted on X: “The extralegal glow regime charge my friends with fake things like money laundering. But they have nothing on me so they strike from the shadow. Weak coward tactics. Face me bitch.”
This is not a one-off. Taaki says that over the past year he has been deported from Argentina and Mexico and detained in Serbia and Japan. Each time, he asks why. Each time, the answer is the same: “just a random check.”
“I am on a list but I am not able to find any info about which country has sanctioned me,” he wrote.
The backstory explains part of it. Taaki is British-Iranian, and in 2016 he spent around three and a half months in Syria fighting with the Kurdish People’s Protection Units against ISIS. He told the BBC about it in 2017. British authorities took an interest in him after that, and the interest never went away.
But read that list again. Fighting ISIS got him on a watchlist. Writing privacy code is what keeps him on it.
The man’s actual résumé is Bitcoin history. He authored BIP 0001, which established the Bitcoin Improvement Proposal process — the mechanism by which Bitcoin changes, or refuses to change (the same process now at the centre of the BIP-110 censorship fight). He wrote the first implementations of CoinJoin, the transaction-joining technique that hides who paid whom. He wrote the first stealth addresses. He built libbitcoin. He founded the UK’s first Bitcoin exchange. Before most people had heard the word “Bitcoin,” he was building the tools that made it usable and private.
Today he works on DarkFi, a privacy protocol. That is the thing Singapore spent six hours asking him about.
According to Bitcoin Magazine, which reported the deportation, Taaki posted a selfie from the room — white walls, acoustic ceiling tiles, a security camera in the corner, a keypad by the door. No windows.
Why This Matters for Bitcoin
Here is the uncomfortable part, and it is the part the industry likes to skip past.
Bitcoin cannot be arrested. Bitcoin cannot be deported. Bitcoin cannot be pulled into a room for six hours and asked what it is working on. The code runs. The network does not ask permission. That is the entire point of it.
So the state goes after the people instead.
You cannot subpoena a protocol, so you subpoena the developer. You cannot ban an algorithm, so you ban the person who wrote it. You cannot shut down a network, so you make the humans around it radioactive — watched at borders, questioned at airports, quietly deported with no explanation and no appeal.
This is not a conspiracy theory. It is a documented pattern, and it is accelerating. In the same stretch of months, Keonne Rodriguez was sent to prison for writing privacy software — he slept on half a mattress next to a man serving twenty years for murder — while attackers who drained $387.5 million from Bitget were still moving the coins in the open, untouched. Nobody deported them. Nobody asked them what they work on. Nobody put them in a white room.
Same year. Same industry. Two completely different outcomes. One group writes privacy tools and goes to jail. The other steals nine figures and walks.
Notice also what Taaki was asked about: privacy. Not fraud. Not theft. Not violence. Privacy. The one thing that makes a Bitcoin holder hard to find, hard to coerce, and hard to steal from. The thing that stops a wrench attack before it starts. The thing that stops a government from freezing an opinion.
If you build a tool that makes people unsearchable, you become searchable.
And notice the language the state uses: “random check.” It is the same three words used for every inconvenient person in every country, and it is unfalsifiable by design. You cannot prove a check was not random. You cannot appeal a decision nobody will admit they made. You cannot find the list you are on, because the list does not officially exist.
A list you cannot read, applied by people who will not name themselves, against work that is completely legal. That is the machine, and Taaki just walked out of one of its rooms.
The Love Is Bitcoin Takeaway
Bitcoin’s whole value proposition is that you do not need permission. No bank to approve you. No government to authorize you. No middleman to decide whether your transaction is acceptable this week.
But there is a catch that most people only learn the hard way: permissionless money is only as permissionless as your privacy.
If every coin you own can be traced to your name, your address, and your exchange account, then you never really left the banking system. You just changed the format. The ledger is public forever. Your identity attached to it is the only thing standing between you and being targeted — by criminals, by data brokers, by anyone with a database and a grudge.
That is why privacy tools exist. (FinCEN quietly withdrew its unhosted-wallet surveillance rule this year and told you in writing it is coming back.) That is why CoinJoin was written. That is why self-custody matters. Not because you are doing something wrong, but because you are doing something right and you would rather not be on a list for it.
Taaki wrote the rulebook for changing Bitcoin, and he wrote some of the first tools for using it privately. If someone like that can be pulled into a room and questioned for six hours about “what I work on,” then understand the stakes clearly: the network is unstoppable, but the people around it are not.
Learn the tools. Hold your own keys. Protect your privacy. Do not assume that because the code is free, the people using it are.
What Beginners Should Do Next
- Understand that privacy is not a crime. CoinJoin, private addresses, and self-custody are legal tools used by ordinary people who do not want to be robbed or tracked. Learn what they do before you repeat what the headlines say about them.
- Learn the difference between Bitcoin and everything else. Bitcoin is a bearer asset. Your keys, your coins. No keys, no coins — just a promise from a company.
- Move off the exchange. Every coin sitting on a custodial platform is a coin with your name attached to it, in someone else’s database, subject to someone else’s rules.
- Learn basic wallet hygiene. Hardware wallet, seed phrase written down offline, never photographed, never typed into a website, never stored in your email.
- Learn what a coin’s history says about you. Chain analysis companies sell exactly this. Understand that every transaction you make is permanent and public.
- Support the developers. The people writing privacy and self-custody tools are doing the work that makes your stack usable. OpenSats has moved tens of millions in grants to Bitcoin builders — every dollar pass-through, with fees that round to pocket change.
- Start with education, not price charts. Understand what you own and why it cannot be confiscated from you when it is held properly.
FAQ
Who is Amir Taaki?
Amir Taaki is a British-Iranian programmer and one of Bitcoin’s earliest contributors. He authored BIP 0001, which established Bitcoin’s improvement-proposal process, wrote the first implementations of CoinJoin and stealth addresses, created the libbitcoin library, and founded the UK’s first Bitcoin exchange. He now works on DarkFi, a crypto privacy protocol.
Why was Amir Taaki deported from Singapore?
He says Singaporean police questioned him for six hours about “what I work on,” then deported him. No charge was filed and no reason was given. He says he has also been deported from Argentina and Mexico and detained in Serbia and Japan in the past year.
What is BIP 0001?
BIP 0001 is the document Amir Taaki wrote that created the Bitcoin Improvement Proposal process — the formal mechanism through which changes to Bitcoin are proposed, debated, and either adopted or rejected by the community.
What is CoinJoin?
CoinJoin is a technique that combines multiple users’ transactions into a single transaction so an outside observer cannot tell which input paid which output. Taaki wrote one of the first implementations. It is a privacy tool, not a crime.
What is DarkFi?
DarkFi is a crypto privacy protocol Taaki is currently developing. It focuses on private, anonymous transactions and applications.
Can a government shut down Bitcoin?
No. There is no company to shut down, no server to seize, and no CEO to arrest. Bitcoin is run by thousands of independent nodes worldwide. Governments can regulate the on-ramps and exchanges, but they cannot stop the network itself.
Can a government go after Bitcoin developers instead?
That is the pattern, and it is the point of this story. Keonne Rodriguez is serving five years for writing privacy software. Taaki was deported from four countries in a year for the same category of work. The network is untouchable, so pressure is applied to the people around it.
Is using Bitcoin privacy tools illegal?
Using privacy tools like CoinJoin is legal in most jurisdictions. Regulatory pressure has been aimed at the developers of those tools rather than users. Check your local laws, but understand that privacy in money is not the same thing as wrongdoing.
What can I do to protect myself?
Hold your own keys in a hardware wallet, keep your seed phrase offline, avoid keeping large balances on exchanges, and learn how transaction history can link back to your identity.
Final Thoughts
Six hours. A white room. No charge. No lawyer. No explanation. Then a plane.
That is what happens to the man who wrote Bitcoin’s rulebook — the same man who wrote the first CoinJoin. Not because he broke a law, but because he built tools that make people hard to track and hard to take.
The Bitcoin network is not scared of any of this. It does not sleep at borders. It cannot be questioned, deported, or put on a list. It just keeps producing blocks.
But the people around it are human, and they can be pushed. So here is the lesson, and it is not a comfortable one: the protocol is unstoppable, and the people who make it useful are not.
Hold your own keys. Learn the privacy tools. Support the developers who build them. The network protects itself. Somebody has to protect them.
If you want to take custody seriously instead of just talking about it, start with an exchange that respects the whole point of Bitcoin — no KYC theater, no custody games. Use coupon code LOVEISBITCOIN and get started here: https://loveisbitcoin.com/bull
Here is the question: if writing privacy code is enough to get you deported from four countries in one year, how long until they come for the people who merely use it? Tell us in the comments.
SINGAPORE DEPORTED A BITCOIN LEGEND FOR WRITING PRIVACY CODE - AND WON'T TELL HIM WHY
