Amir Taaki, the British-Iranian crypto-anarchist and former Bitcoin Core contributor widely described as a cypherpunk legend, says he was deported from Singapore after a six-hour police interrogation — the latest in a string of detentions and expulsions he has faced across multiple countries.

Writing on X on Tuesday, Taaki, one of the earliest contributors to Bitcoin, said Singaporean police questioned him about "what I work on" before removing him from the country.

He shared news of the encounter in a post on X:

Just got questioned for 6 hours by glow police then deported from Singapore. Everything about what I work on. 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.… pic.twitter.com/l3SPA7lwWR

— Amir Taaki ⛛ (@lunardragon420) October 6, 2026 (source)

Taaki, who has made significant contributions to Bitcoin privacy over the years and today is working on a cryptographic privacy protocol called DarkFi, argued that authorities have pursued him and his associates without formal legal grounds. "The extralegal glow regime charge my friends with fake things like money laundering," he wrote. "But they have nothing on me so they strike from the shadow. Weak coward tactics. Face me bitch."

The word "glow" is internet slang, common in cypherpunk and crypto circles, for undercover state or intelligence agents — vocabulary rooted in the movement's decades-long opposition to surveillance.

The developer said the Singapore episode forms part of a broader pattern. In the past year alone, he has also been deported from Argentina and Mexico, and detained in Serbia and Japan.

"Every time it happens I ask why and they always tell me it's just a random check," he said, adding that authorities never give reasons for why he is being detained or questioned.

"I am on a list but I am not able to find any info about which country has sanctioned me."

Taaki first faced trouble with British authorities after traveling to Syria in 2016 to fight against the Islamic State group. He said in a 2017 BBC interview that he spent three and a half months fighting with the Kurdish People's Protection Units before helping with community projects in the country. According to Taaki, his difficulties with certain governments date back to that period.

Taaki's contributions to Bitcoin privacy are extensive: he wrote the first implementations of CoinJoin and stealth addresses, created the libbitcoin library, and founded the United Kingdom's first Bitcoin exchange. He also authored BIP 0001, the proposal that set up the Bitcoin Improvement Proposal process.

CoinJoin, which merges the transactions of multiple users into a single one so that individual payments become harder to trace on-chain, has since been adopted by a range of privacy-focused bitcoin wallets, while stealth addresses generate fresh one-time addresses to obscure who receives a payment. Libbitcoin is an open-source toolkit for building Bitcoin software, and the BIP process Taaki's proposal created still serves as the standard channel through which changes to Bitcoin are proposed and documented. Privacy techniques of this kind have drawn growing attention from financial regulators in recent years.

This article first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.