Amir Taaki was deported from Singapore after police questioned him for six hours, the British-Iranian programmer said this week. Taaki, a former Bitcoin Core contributor who now works on the privacy protocol DarkFi, believes he's on a sanctions or watchlist but hasn't been able to find out which country put him there.
He says Singapore is just the latest stop. Over the past year he claims he's also been deported from Argentina and Mexico, and detained in Serbia and Japan.
Six hours of questions, then a flight out
Details on what Singaporean authorities asked Taaki remain thin. He hasn't published a transcript or named the agency involved, and no government has confirmed the deportation. What's clear is the pattern: Taaki travels, gets stopped, gets put on a plane.
The six-hour questioning is longer than a routine border interview. That length suggests either a specific intelligence interest or a flag attached to his name that officers were trying to verify. Taaki himself says he can't confirm which.
A decade of friction with authorities
This isn't Taaki's first run-in with the state. In 2016 he fought alongside the Kurdish People's Protection Units in Syria, which brought him to the attention of British authorities. That episode has followed him since.
His technical record is harder to argue with. Taaki wrote the first implementations of CoinJoin and stealth addresses — two techniques that later became standard in privacy-focused cryptocurrencies. He created libbitcoin, founded the UK's first Bitcoin exchange, and authored BIP 0001, the document that established the Bitcoin Improvement Proposal process itself.
That last one is worth pausing on. Nearly every change to Bitcoin since has gone through a process Taaki set up. He's not a marginal figure in the ecosystem's history, even if his current work sits far from the mainstream.
DarkFi and the privacy fight
Taaki's current project, DarkFi, is a crypto privacy protocol. The timing isn't great for him or the project. Privacy coins and privacy tooling have been under sustained pressure from regulators in the US, EU, and parts of Asia, with exchanges delisting anonymity-focused assets and law enforcement treating mixers as money-laundering infrastructure.
Being deported from multiple countries while building privacy tech is a difficult combination. It limits where Taaki can base himself, complicates travel for conferences or partner meetings, and raises questions for anyone considering contributing to DarkFi about whether association with him carries legal risk.
Taaki hasn't said where he is now.
The list he can't see
The core unresolved question is the one Taaki keeps raising: if he's on a list, whose list is it? He says he's tried to find out and come up empty. Deportations don't always come with paperwork explaining the underlying reason — sometimes the receiving country isn't told either.
Without a named sanction, there's no obvious appeal process, no court to file in, no regulator to petition. That's the trap. A person can be repeatedly removed from countries without ever getting a formal designation they can challenge.
Taaki hasn't announced his next destination. Given the past year, the more useful question might be which countries will still let him in.
