| Amir Taaki | |
|---|---|
Amir Taaki, 2011 |
|
| Nationality | English |
| Occupation | chairman, Bitcoin Consultancy |
| Known for | Crystal Space, Game development, Bitcoin |
Amir Taaki (born 6 February 1988) is a British video game and computer software developer. Taaki is best known as the chairman of the Bitcoin Consultancy, as a Bitcoin project developer and for pioneering many open source projects.
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Amir Taaki was born 6 February 1988 in London, the eldest of three children of a Scotch-English mother and an Iranian father.
From an early age Taaki took an interest in computer technology, teaching himself computer programming.[1]
An inquisitive and precocious youth, Taaki became involved in computer hacking, activity which ultimately was discovered and lead to his expulsion from high school.[1]
After briefly attending several British universities and not finding formal academics to his liking, Taaki gravitated to the free software movement. Taaki assisted in the creation of SDL Collide, an extension of Simple DirectMedia Layer, an open source library used by video game developers.[2]
In 2006, Taaki became heavily involved in Crystal Space development under the pseudonym of genjix.[3] He also developed a number of video games making use of free software, including the adventure game Crystal Core[4] and the futuristic racer game Ecksdee.[5] Taaki was also a participant in the Blender project Yo Frankie!.[6]
Taaki was a speaker at the 2007 Games Convention in Leipzig.
In 2009 and 2010, Taaki made his living as a professional poker player.[1] His experience with online gambling piqued his interest in the technical process of online financial transfers and attracted him to the Bitcoin project, an attempt to create a decentralized mechanism for the transfer of funds independent of giant financial corporations.[7]
Taaki founded a UK Bitcoin exchange called "Britcoin" as a means to help the growth of Bitcoin. This was succeeded in 2011 by a new British exchange called Intersango, in which Taaki is a principal.[8]
Taaki is a developer of Spesmilo, an alternative Bitcoin front-end Graphical User Interface written in Python released in February 2011. He also is the original author of the Bitcoin stock-exchange client named Black-Market and maintains a custom Bitcoin version on gitorious.[9] Taaki has also created a merchant site named Pastecoin for sharing files[10] and a bitcoin site to fund Bitcoin client features via bounties for developers.[9]
In April 2011, Taaki and Donald Norman established the Bitcoin Consultancy, a group focused on bitcoin project development.[11]
Taaki has been outspoken in favour of internet activism such as Anonymous, likening them to modern day freedom-fighters.[12] A long-time contributor to free software, he advocates total data freedom.[11] Taaki has labeled censorship policies as being a wedge towards ever-increasing censorship.[12] He proposes a shift away from specialist thinking towards a creative society of generalist knowledge workers.[13]
Taaki self-identifies as an anarchist but believes that ideologies should not remain fixed against evidence. He states that beliefs should not be a matter of contention when ideas change all the time due to new knowledge and information.[11]
He has written about New Urbanism, advocating high-density pedestrian-oriented cities. Taaki has written that cities should be diverse and have mixed uses.
Taaki is a speaker of Esperanto, which he promotes as an auxiliary country-neutral international language to preserve local languages. He writes that Esperanto serves to break down barriers and help the flow of media across cultural boundaries.[14]