Revered UK Bitcoin developer Amir Taaki wants to recruit five “preferably female” developers to live a “quasi-monastic” lifestyle in order to give Bitcoin a “vision,” Wired reports March 6.
In an interview with Wired, Taaki, who is known among the Bitcoin technical community as a central figure in preserving the largest cryptocurrency’s original values, said he even has plans to use the “monk hackers” to effect Bitcoin- and Blockchain-powered political change - beginning in Catalonia.
“It will be like a startup accelerator, only a politicised one. Not driven by profit, but by social change,” Wired quotes him as saying during a speech in the politically troubled Spanish province.
From September 2015, Taaki spent several months fighting Isis terrorists in a Kurdish-controlled autonomous part of Northern Syria before engaging with social reconstruction while introducing inhabitants to Bitcoin.
Now, he says, reviving the spirit of Bitcoin is one step on the road to the “complete collapse of the world state system.”
“Bitcoin doesn't have any vision behind it, any vision of where it's going,” Taaki told Wired.
“All the original ideas about using bitcoin for challenging power - or privacy, or new forms of economic systems - are falling by the wayside. Now it's simply a small community obsessed with the price going up.”
The five prospective hackers, which should ideally be “young and female” for “gender equality” reasons, need not have technical experience - but be willing to work for free in a house with Taaki in Catalonia.