Amir Taaki and Cody Wilson are cruising north through Texas on Interstate 35 in the 4:30 am predawn darkness. One of the headlights on the aging BMW Wilson's driving is burned out, and he’s wearing sunglasses. “They’re prescription,” he says drily.
It’s May Day, every anarchist’s favorite holiday, and the two 26-year-olds have marked the occasion by releasing a piece of software that represents their best attempt so far to undermine every government in the world. A call from a lawyer friend has reminded them that creative US prosecutors might hit them with conspiracy or other charges. So they’ve decided to skip town.
Half an hour earlier, they pulled out of Wilson’s apartment in Austin and began the long nighttime drive to Dallas, where Wilson has booked Taaki a last-minute flight to Barcelona. Taaki has friends there living in a squat in an abandoned police station. Wilson himself plans to lay low in his hometown of Little Rock, Arkansas. A 29-year-old Canadian friend, cryptographer Peter Todd, is riding along in the back seat.
Not far into the drive, I see Wilson fiddling with something near the gearshift, and he explains that he’s just removed the battery from his cell phone to prevent its being used by police to track him.
In the passenger seat, Taaki, who doesn't even own a working cell phone, just laughs. The diminutive Iranian-Brit sports a black mustache and what can properly be described only as a mullet. He seems to be treating his sudden escape from the US as an exciting adventure. But Wilson, a square-jawed southerner with a trim beard, displays something closer to paranoia. “What are the chances we’ll make it through the next three hours without being pulled over by the cops?” he asks. No response.
Concerns about the police are justified for Wilson and Taaki, who have dedicated their careers to building some of the most controversial software ever offered to the public. Wilson gained notoriety last year as the creator of the world’s first fully 3D-printable gun, a set of CAD files known as the Liberator that anyone can download and print in the privacy of their home to create a working, lethal firearm. Taaki and his collaborators recently unveiled a prototype for a decentralized online marketplace, known as DarkMarket, that’s designed to be impervious to shutdown by the feds.
The programming provocation they released a few hours ago is called Dark Wallet, a piece of software designed to allow untraceable, anonymous online payments using the cryptocurrency bitcoin. Taaki and Wilson see in bitcoin’s stateless transactions the potential for a new economy that fulfills the crypto-anarchist dream of truly uncontrollable money. They envision a digital payment network that circumvents every authority’s attempts to tax it, seize it, censor it, track it, or imprison those who would use it to trade in contraband like weapons, drugs, and even abhorrent services like murder-for-hire and child pornography.
And yet for all that, Dark Wallet isn’t necessarily illegal. Taaki and Wilson, who spent two years in law school before dropping out to pursue his anarchist dreams, argue their creation is just a piece of code and thus protected by free speech laws. Then again, Wilson also has described it publicly as “money-laundering software.” The evening before, he received an unhappy email from his lawyer friend, cautioning him about expressing criminal intent in an interview with me that was published two days earlier. Wilson’s half of the ensuing phone conversation went like this: “How can we cower now? We’re the people who do things and tell them to put up or shut up … [pause] … I guess you’d rather I go back to running guns? … [pause] … OK, I’ll talk to you later.”
Hence the unplanned road trip.
The drive through the empty Texas landscape gives me a chance to ask the looming question: How will the world change if Taaki and Wilson succeed in their quest to make money truly anonymous? “There’s going to be a bit of a shake-up,” says Taaki, who speaks with a British accent that borders on cockney. “No one knows how it’s going to turn out.”
He pauses. “The assassination markets are going to be a bit shit.” Untraceable murder-for-hire, in other words, could be an unfortunate side effect of their financial innovation.
Then he seems to regain his resolve. “I believe in the hacker ethic. Empower the small guy, privacy and anonymity, mistrust authority, promote decentralized alternatives, freedom of information,” he says. “These are good principles. The individual against power.”
Warming to his subject, Taaki raises his voice as if he’s speaking to a crowd larger than the three of us here in the car. “But it’s important to be clear that it may not be good on balance, either,” he says. “The world is not perfect. Good and evil rise together.”
Wilson cuts in from the driver’s seat, shifting into agitprop mode. “It’s time for a good old-fashioned pendulum swing,” he says. “Where the people fear the government there’s tyranny. Where the government fears the people there’s liberty. They’re afraid, therefore it’s good.”
But Taaki seems willing to contemplate a more uncertain outcome of the anarchy he and Wilson seek to create.
“It will be different, more diverse,” he muses, as if imagining this new reality for the first time. “We’ll step out into a new world, and we can explore it in any direction we choose.”
The 21st century has already seen its first experiment in crypto-anarchy: the billion-dollar, anonymous online drug marketplace known as Silk Road. In October 2013, the FBI seized the well-hidden server that hosted the site on the anonymity network Tor. The agency also arrested its alleged founder, 29-year-old Ross Ulbricht, calling his work a vast narcotics and money-laundering conspiracy.
Cody Wilson would call it a mere proof of concept.
In a packed bar on East London’s Brick Lane two months after the Silk Road crackdown, Wilson stood onstage—inexplicably wearing a single leather glove—and scolded the audience of the London Bitcoin Expo: “Ross Ulbricht is alleged to be the founder and operator of Silk Road, the glittering jewel of all things libertarian, black market, and wonderful. And it’s a severe indictment of the modern libertarian conscience that he can’t get any support at all.” (At the time, just $3,800 dollars had been donated to the fund-raising site created by Ulbricht’s family, FreeRoss.org, well short of their $50,000 goal. That lukewarm response likely had much to do with prosecutors’ claims that Ulbricht had paid hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of bitcoins to contacts he believed were hit men who would kill his enemies, including a blackmailer and a potential informant.)
Wilson called out those in the bitcoin community who applauded the takedown of Silk Road as a step toward “legitimizing” their cryptocurrency, helping to shift it from a lawless anarcho-money innovation to some sort of sanitized sequel to the status quo payment system—Visa and Western Union with smaller transaction fees. “Ladies and gentlemen, the problem with Silk Road was that it was centralized,” Wilson continued. “One man ran it and they found a server. People were back at the drawing board on day two. There are going to be peer-to-peer Silk Roads not managed by one man.
“If bitcoin means anything, it means a thousand Silk Roads,” he said, to rising applause. “It means, fuck your law!”
Six months later, that prophecy has already begun to come true. Even before Wilson’s appearance in London, “Silk Road 2.0” had launched, dealers and users swarming the site by the thousands to trade bitcoins for everything from black tar heroin to forged passports. A mini industry of anonymous copycats has followed, sprouting up overnight like psychedelic mushrooms on cow patties: 1776, Agora, Alpaca Marketplace, Andromeda, BlackBank, Bluesky, Cannabis Road, Cloud-Nine, Evolution, Hydra, Majestic Garden, the Marketplace, Mr. Nice Guy, the Onion Market, Outlaw Market, Pandora, Pirate Market, Silk Street, Silkkitie, Tor Bazaar, Tortuga, Underground Marketplace—and likely more that have kept their names better hidden from nosy reporters. According to a study published in May by the nonprofit Digital Citizens Alliance, more than 40,000 mostly illegal products are now listed for sale on the obscured corner of the Internet known as the dark web, more than twice as many as before the Silk Road bust.
New sites equivalent to Google and Yelp for the online underground allow users to sort through the multiplying outlets. Many of the next-generation contraband sales sites have implemented a clever mechanism known as multisignature transactions, designed to prevent users from losing any funds stored by the vendor if its administrators disappear or the site is seized by law enforcement. And as Wilson predicted, the next generation of anarcho-enterprises already promise to make the feds’ next seizure vastly more difficult: Taaki’s DarkMarket and a project spun off from it called OpenBazaar are intended to function without any central server or administrator. Anyone can buy or sell directly to anyone else in these flat, peer-to-peer systems, so that snooping cops would have to collar users one-by-one to take the market down.
Bitcoin powers all of these budding anonymous bazaars, making it a point of vulnerability in the quest for truly anonymous markets. Indeed, the cryptocurrency created by Satoshi Nakamoto and launched in 2009 has never been the perfectly untraceable payment system that some naive criminals believe it to be.
Bitcoin works only because every transaction is recorded in a public ledger known as the blockchain, an unforgeable accounting file that’s constantly being replicated and distributed to thousands of computers running bitcoin’s software. The blockchain doesn’t identify who’s spending or receiving bitcoins with real names, only jumbled strings of characters known as bitcoin addresses. In theory, that makes the digital currency as anonymous as cash and as frictionless as PayPal.
But in practice, bitcoin isn’t anonymous so much as pseudonymous; if a user’s name is tied to his or her bitcoin addresses, anyone—cop, corporate data hound, random snoop—can follow the blockchain to learn every detail of where his or her bitcoins end up. “It doesn’t matter if the bagman is wearing a mask and a hoodie if the bills are marked,” as Johns Hopkins computer science researcher Ian Miers puts it. “With bitcoin, all the bills are marked.”
Bitcoin’s pseudonyms can be cracked when the feds send a legal request to a law-abiding bitcoin service or exchange, many of which increasingly require proof of a user’s identity. When I used bitcoin to buy marijuana from Silk Road and two other online black markets last year (purely as a demonstration, rest assured), UC San Diego researcher Sarah Meiklejohn traced all three drug buys from my known address at the bitcoin service Coinbase through the blockchain, and quickly figured out exactly how much I’d spent at each of the three contraband markets.
Yet it takes only a technical nudge to drop bitcoins into the shadows. Send your coins through a “laundry” service like Bitcoin Fog or BitBlender, and the service will mix them up with coins from other bitcoiners and, if you’re lucky, give you back the same amount. (Users of the services occasionally complain that their coins instead disappear without a trace.)
Those laundries, along with a growing movement of more private bitcoin alternatives like Darkcoin and Zerocoin, can be described as simply trying to make cryptocurrency more like cash, says Jon Matonis, the executive director of the Bitcoin Foundation. Hundred dollar bills, he points out, are also mostly anonymous and untraceable.
Matonis warns that if governments push too hard to control cryptocurrencies, more than they do with old-fashioned cash, bitcoiners will turn to more anonymous payment tools or even integrate their features directly into the bitcoin protocol. “For regulators, this is not a consequence-free zone,” Matonis says. “Every measure is met with a countermeasure.” Shine too strong a light on the inner workings of the crypto economy, in other words, and it may retreat into the dark altogether.
Wilson and Taaki intend Dark Wallet to be the most user-friendly method yet to spend bitcoins under the cover of anonymity’s shadow—without switching to a niche alternative coin or trusting any shady middleman.
Every coin spent through the program, an add-on to Google’s Chrome browser, gets matched up and merged with another transaction in a process called CoinJoin. The trick is a bit like Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train, who agree to murder each other’s victims: When Dark Wallet combines two transactions on behalf of two users, their coins are spent simultaneously. The blockchain only records one movement of money, and since the CoinJoin negotiation is encrypted, there’s no way to tell whose coins end up where. As Dark Wallet’s user base grows—today it’s already in the low thousands despite still being in development—those CoinJoins will grow to combine three or even more transactions. Add enough users and the system becomes “a magnificent layer of uncertainty” over “a massive confusion of addresses,” as one early tester describes it.
Dark Wallet also offers what it calls “stealth addresses” that allow a user to receive bitcoins at an encrypted address, where only he or she can retrieve them using a private key. When a coin passes through either a CoinJoin transaction or a stealth address, it becomes vastly more difficult to track, making taxation, regulation, and prosecution virtually impossible. “We want a bitcoin that laughs at the regulatory pageantry,” Wilson says. “We’re going to permanently problematize bitcoin’s reputation.”
Bitcoin’s reputation is hardly spotless now. It’s already being used for darker purposes than drug markets: The International Center for Missing and Exploited Children reports that several major child pornography sites accept bitcoin. Late last year a site called Assassination Market attempted to use bitcoin to crowdfund the murder of political figures. Fans donated more than $50,000 for anyone who killed then-Federal Reserve chair Ben Bernanke—a bête noire of the cryptolibertarian crowd—though there haven’t been any known attempts to claim its bounties.
A recent article on a blog supporting the Islamic State, the extremist group that’s occupied portions of Iraq, praised bitcoin as a potential channel for funding jihadi fighters. It specifically cited Dark Wallet as a useful tool for hiding those flows of money. "Dark Wallet is a new Bitcoin wallet designed to completely hide the activities of it’s [sic] users, providing total online anonymity.... This allows our brothers stuck outside of the [Islamic State territory] to avoid government taxes along with secretly fund the mujahideen with no legal danger upon them," reads the post. "It is simple, easy, and we ask Allah to hasten it’s [sic] usage for us."
If Dark Wallet works as promised—a big “if,” given that the software is still entirely experimental and only scheduled to enter a more public test phase later this summer—it may indeed provide those violent revolutionaries a new source of funding. “It’s a destructive model,” says Juan Zarate, a former deputy national security adviser to President George W. Bush who has worked on efforts to root out terrorist financing and seize the assets of Saddam Hussein. “To say you’re going to encourage or facilitate illicit activity regardless of the consequences strikes me as not only irresponsible but bordering on flat out illegal.”
Taaki responds that Dark Wallet isn’t about financing bloodshed. "Humanity doesn’t need tools for funding violence, and that’s not what this is about," he says. "We do need tools to buy and sell drugs online, to gamble online, to transfer money to Iranians and North Koreans, to enable kids to run businesses on the Internet, to manage resources collectively."
Wilson takes a harder line. “Well, yes, bad things are going to happen on these marketplaces,” he says. “To quote the old civil libertarians, liberty is a dangerous thing.”
In fact, he chose Dark Wallet’s name as a reference to “going dark,” a term the FBI uses when it describes its worst-case scenario of all communications becoming perfectly encrypted, foiling the bureau’s crime-fighting surveillance. But the potential to create a new, lawless society in the shadows of an impotent government is exactly what Wilson has in mind. “Bitcoin is what they fear it is,” he says in the voiceover to a fundraising video for Dark Wallet that has collected more than $70,000 from supporters. “A way to leave. To forbid. To make a choice. There’s a system approaching perfection just in time for our disappearance.”
“So,” he intones dramatically, his figure in the video half-hidden in shadow. “Let there be dark.”
Wilson and Taaki make an unlikely pair: Wilson dresses in neat polo shirts and baseball caps; when I first met Taaki, he was wearing stained sweatpants and four layers of moth-eaten sweaters. Wilson has proven to be a master of fundraising and recently signed a $250,000 deal to write a memoir for Simon & Schuster. Taaki, despite his bitcoin obsession, seems to be chronically broke. And while Wilson holds forth like a Nietzschean, Tyler Durden–style prophet of the apocalypse, Taaki speaks more like a wild-eyed idealist.
But over the past two years, Taaki and Wilson have traveled together to half a dozen countries, the Texas-rooted Wilson following the itinerant Taaki in his wandering. They seem to deeply enjoy each other’s company; they’re capable of bringing one another to tears of laughter recounting favorite 4chan memes. And when it comes to politics, they’re both ready to tear down every existing power structure and start from scratch.
Amir Taaki grew up the oldest son of an Iranian real estate developer and his British artist wife in the small southeast English town of Broadstairs. He remembers his grammar school teachers as “fascists.” One, for instance, would scream at students and punish them by throwing a bottle full of beads on the floor, forcing kids to pick them up one by one. Miss one and he would scatter the beads again.
Taaki discovered early on that he had an innate talent with computers and programming. He used it to exact revenge, hacking into the school IT administrator’s computer repeatedly. He also cut holes in the school fence to escape to the supermarket in the middle of the day and broke into the teachers’ offices with friends to carry out what they called “operations”: rearranging the furniture, cutting surveillance camera wires, changing door knobs. He was expelled at the age of 17. “I never liked being told what to do, really,” he says. “A lot of my life has been a bit of a struggle against that.”
At home, Taaki’s father was as strict as his teachers but less predictable: His sister Jamila remembers their father flying into a rage if his son swore or even said something in the wrong tone. Yet he often overlooked more serious mischief; Taaki and his sister once broke into an old hotel, stole the bibles from every room, doused them with cleaning fluid, set them on fire, and threw them down a well to see how deep it went. For that, their father never punished them. “Amir has always been very special and always had this general sense of disobedience,” Jamila says. “The squats, open-source software—all of it is about actively controlling your destiny instead of being part of some set and ready system.”
Wilson’s childhood was positively conventional by comparison. Growing up in Arkansas, he was a Boy Scout, then a varsity track athlete and a straight-A student. He initially adopted the politics of his parents, neoconservative Republicans with what would today be described as a Tea Party distrust of big government. Wilson’s father practices as an asset protection lawyer, and in some ways Wilson sees his quest for untouchable currency as the logical extension of that work.
The elder Wilson also was a pastor at several churches; father and son spent hours debating philosophy and theology. “I was not his equal,” Dennis Wilson says of his son. “The hardest theological questions asked of me in my years of being a pastor were asked by my son before the age of 15.”
Wilson read his father’s copy of Friedrich Hayek’s libertarian gospel The Road To Serfdom for the first time even earlier, when he was 10. By high school he was a Marxist. By college he discovered critical theory and anarchism, and spent those years honing radically antistate views. “When I wasn’t doing anything else, I was sitting in the library, doing this massive survey of political thought,” Wilson says. Today, library copies of Nietzsche, Baudrillard, and Foucault are strewn around his Austin apartment, next to components of AK-47s and 3-D-printed pistols.
After graduating from the University of Central Arkansas with a degree in literature, Wilson enrolled in law school at the University of Texas at Austin, thinking he would follow in his father’s footsteps. But his new radical hobbies were far more interesting. “I wanted to do something, other and beyond this terrible hell of the same,” he says.
After the Citizens United ruling on campaign finance in 2010, he and a friend decided to create a fund-raising political action committee for bankrolling extreme attack ads against candidates from both political parties. “We would pick the biggest sellout and go after them,” Wilson says. “We thought we could define a new class of super PAC that could run American political culture into the gutter. It seemed fun.”
When that project failed to raise serious money, Wilson came up with the idea of becoming some kind of arms dealer. With the buzz around consumer 3-D printers like the Makerbot growing in 2012, he saw the potential to create the first fully printable lethal firearm. As he saw it, this Wiki-Weapon would pose a brilliant quandary for gun control advocates: If firearms become purely digital, the second amendment and the first merge, and free speech protections apply to weapons. “Everywhere there’s a computer, there would be the promise of a gun,” he told me when we first spoke in 2012. “I see a world where contraband will pass underground through the data cables to be printed in our homes as the drones move overhead. I see a kind of poetry there. I dream of this very weird future and I’d like to be a part of it.”
That summer, Wilson launched a fund-raiser for the project, which he called Defense Distributed, on the crowdfunding platform Indiegogo. The campaign managed to collect a few thousand dollars before being booted from the site, its funds seized for violations of Indiegogo’s terms of service. So Wilson, who had watched WikiLeaks battle against a payments embargo orchestrated by PayPal, Bank of America, Visa, Mastercard, and others in early 2011, solicited bitcoin donations instead. He won’t reveal exactly how much he raised. But as bitcoin’s exchange rate against the dollar rocketed in late 2012 and 2013, he says the cryptocurrency came to represent more than 99 percent of his funds.
In May of 2013, after months of testing, Wilson fired the world’s first 3-D-printed pistol in a remote central Texas firing range. He called it the Liberator. He quit law school the same week.
Despite a State Department demand that Defense Distributed take down the gun’s blueprints or face an investigation for possible illegal export of munitions, the files immediately spread across the web and were downloaded more than 100,000 times in two days. A year later, Congress still hasn’t caught up: An attempt to add a provision against 3-D-printed gun components to the Undetectable Firearms Act last year fell flat, as lawmakers deadlocked on issues that many of them seemed to dismiss as science fiction.
Taaki, meanwhile, took a more wayward path. He tried a career as a videogame programmer but left his job amid infighting among the open source developers. Disillusioned with programming, he wandered Europe and the Middle East for years, living off his winnings as an online poker player. He slept in squats, jumped turnstiles, and learned Esperanto. As gambling started to feel rote and mechanical, he began to imagine programming his own poker site based on open source code, exposing the cryptographic algorithms so that the games would be provably fair. As he explored ways to handle payments on the site, a mathematician friend sent him Satoshi Nakamoto’s bitcoin white paper, which in late 2010 still seemed like a theoretical moonshot. After several days of reading bitcoin forums, “suddenly everything connected and it was like, oh wow, fuck, a big fire in my head,” he says.
Over the next few years, Taaki lived through the peaks and pitfalls of the early bitcoin boom, gaining a track record that has made him a hero to some bitcoiners and a hoodlum to others. In 2011, for instance, he built one of the first bitcoin exchanges, Britcoin. He also later consulted at a bitcoin trading firm called Bitcoinica that went bankrupt after a massive hack. Many of the company’s users blame Taaki for open-sourcing the code and revealing credentials that allowed much of its funds to be stolen. He’s named as one of the defendants in a pending lawsuit in California that seeks $460,000.
With a kind of willful optimism, Taaki dismisses that fiasco as a “lot of drama.” He forged ahead with new projects like a complete reimplementation of bitcoin known as libbitcoin, a full rewriting of the currency’s code that many consider cleaner and more modular than Nakamoto’s original work. He published it along with a libbitcoin manifesto expressing the need to keep bitcoin from being coopted by centralized power, complete with a fist as the PDF's watermark.
In 2012, Taaki spotted Wilson’s bitcoin fund-raiser for Defense Distributed. He wrote to Wilson two days after his campaign was banned from Indiegogo and asked Wilson to speak at a bitcoin conference in London, where they met for the first time. “We started a kind of friendship almost instantly,” Wilson says, as I watch them tell the story of their bromance in the basement of an Austin anarchist bookshop for a radio broadcast called the Crypto Show, on the eve of their Dark Wallet release. “Amir and bitcoin lived together in my mind from that same point.”
“I’m touched,” Taaki adds, grinning.
Wilson puts his arm around Taaki and gives him a squeeze. “Love you, man.”
A few months after Wilson’s Liberator debut, Taaki emailed Wilson about his idea for a new bitcoin application tailored to the needs of crypto-anarchists. Wilson saw it as a fitting sequel to his 3-D-printed gun: a piece of code that opens an uncloseable can of worms for the federal government. “You’ve set yourself up to regulate bitcoin,” Wilson says, addressing his enemies in Washington. “Regulate this.’”
Their goal, with both the 3-D-printed gun and untraceable currency, isn’t simply to help people violate the law. In fact, it’s to give people tools that make illegal behavior so commonplace and technically trivial that the law ceases to be relevant. In Wilson and Taaki’s version of the future, technology, not law, makes the rules. “We’re declaring ourselves sovereign,” Taaki says. “We’re making the government obsolete.”
In a dim room in an abandoned meat market on the graffiti-covered outskirts of Milan, Taaki sits in a folding chair before a rapt group of Italian anarchists. It's late 2013, and for the past 10 days, Taaki and his programming mentor and partner Pablo Martinez have been managing a group of more than a dozen coders and designers from around the world—a loose-knit collective spanning more than 10 countries that calls itself unSystem—that’s been camped out in an upstairs room, working on Dark Wallet.
Wilson stopped by the squat a few days ago, on his way to the London Bitcoin Expo, to hand over the first portion of the money from his fundraiser, which will be doled out to pay unSystem’s coders when they hit certain milestones. But it’s Taaki who’s organized the no-frills venue, brought unSystem together, and serves as its host. Following a schedule with little regard for night and day, he and the other coders hack on Dark Wallet for hours, hold impromptu teaching sessions on various crypto schemes, smoke heroic amounts of marijuana, and sleep on mattresses in a frigid, unheated room next door.
Now, lit by the devilish glow of a wood-burning stove behind him, Taaki lays out for the visiting anarchists a view of the crypto-anarchic future that’s far cheerier than his surroundings. “Bitcoin will enable humans to organize in ways that weren’t before possible,” he says, gesturing wildly with a giant spliff held upright in his right fist like a middle finger. “It will allow people to assemble together and build structures that we’ve never imagined.”
Then One
WikiLeaks, he reminds the group, was able to raise donations in bitcoin to circumvent the financial blockade against it. When Kim Dotcom’s copyright-flouting file-transfer website Megaupload and all his bank accounts were seized by the feds in 2012, Dotcom reemerged months later with a new, bitcoin-accepting encrypted storage startup.
Taaki goes on to describe the bitcoin anarchist’s elusive ideal: decentralized, autonomous corporations whose equity is tracked in the bitcoin blockchain rather than in legal contracts and whose funds are held at a bitcoin address controlled in part by every stakeholder. With tricks like multisignature transactions, it’s theoretically possible to create accounts in which thousands of people control a pool of bitcoins simultaneously with no leader, and coins can only be moved when some majority agrees to cryptographically sign a transaction.
In that future, math and consensus, not violence, might govern the control of resources. The result, as Taaki describes it, would be a new society where code replaces courts and men with guns as the arbiter of civilization. “We have new tools, a new class of mathematical contracts, based on the incorruptible rules of the cosmos,” he says, his voice resonating through the empty building.
This is Taaki at the height of his idealistic rhetoric. But after his speech, a member of the audience finds Taaki on a couch upstairs, in a room filled with unSystem coders in front of laptops. The Italian visitor asks him an innocent question: If bitcoin is such a force for good, why give Dark Wallet such a menacing name? “It’s like the word faggot or nigger,” Taaki says without hesitation. “Those words were used as slurs, and then they were taken back. That’s what we’re doing with the black market. The black market is cool! The black market is better than the white market!”
“Dark like a Spaniard!” Taaki continues, grinning impishly and raising his voice for the benefit of his half dozen Spanish friends who traveled to Milan with him from Catalonia. “Dark like an Italian! Dark like my balls!
“We’re villains! We’re going to reclaim our word, and we’re going to be proud of it.”
Six months of coding and wanderlust later, Taaki has made his way from Milan to New York to Toronto to Wilson’s home in Austin, where the plan is to release an early version of Dark Wallet and then to continue refining the software for another month before heading to California. The two friends sit in Wilson’s living room as Taaki fiddles with Wilson’s AR-15 in his lap. Perhaps thinking about the legal advice from his friend, Wilson tells Taaki that he has a "bad feeling."
Taaki stops playing with the gun. “You think I should skedaddle?”
“If you’re going to go, you should go now,” Wilson says. “Do you have any money to buy a ticket?”
“I have 50 euros,” Taaki replies. Wilson says he’ll buy the ticket.
Later that night, they’re on the road to Dallas. As the trip stretches into its second hour, the sky begins to glow from behind the horizon, and the conundrum of how anonymous money will change the world still hasn’t been answered.
Now it’s Peter Todd, a bitcoin consultant whom Taaki and Wilson have given the title of chief scientist of the Dark Wallet project, who’s posing the hard questions from the back seat. What if, he asks, untraceable bitcoins are used to secretly fund the campaigns of entrenched political leaders, empowering the powerful instead of the powerless?
“I don’t give a fuck about elections,” Taaki answers.
“I guess my question is, have you ever said ‘this might make the world worse if I shook it up in this way?’” Todd asks.
“Bitcoin is about empowerment for those that want to be empowered. Yes, it has a cruelty to it,” Taaki says.
“But maybe it empowers ‘might makes right’ values,” Todd says.
“We can only think a few steps ahead,” Taaki answers. “It’s all pie in the sky.”
“I just think we’re better at tactics than strategy,” Todd says.
After a few moments’ silence, Wilson quotes some Nietzsche: the moment in Thus Spoke Zarathustra when the book’s prophet preaches to the people about the Last Man and the Overman. But no one picks up the thread.
The sun begins to rise out of Taaki’s passenger-side window. “I don’t know,” he says. “No, the world won’t be a wonderful place with bunny rabbits and a beautiful utopia where everyone has equal amounts of money.
“But it will be interesting, won’t it?”
