S17 E20: Amir Taaki, Harry Halpin & Christopher Cialone on Palantir’s Technofascism, the Roman Storm Trial & the Privacy Arms Race

Some episodes are planned for months. This one happened because Zach Herbert postponed, I panicked, and the universe compensated me with three guests at once: Amir Taaki, lead developer of DarkFi, who opened the stream by casually flipping a knife he apparently learned to handle during military service. Harry Halpin, CEO of Nym and one of academia’s loudest privacy advocates, who had 40 minutes before he had to run and used every second of them.

And Christopher Cialone (ChalonCodes on X), builder, educator, and one of the few people actually showing up in person to the Roman Storm trial and reporting back what the prosecutors are really arguing. Nobody paid to be here, nobody gets editorial approval, and everything you are about to read happened live, including a shirt change, a laundry session, and at least four Amir phone crashes.

For context, because I admitted on air that I had not read it either: days before we recorded, Palantir published a 22-point manifesto on X summarizing CEO Alex Karp‘s book The Technological Republic (co-authored with Nicholas Zamiska), calling for Silicon Valley to merge with the state, accelerate AI weapons, and embrace “hard power.” One MP called it the ramblings of a supervillain. Harry had written a response the night before, sleep-deprived, called the Anti-Palantir Manifesto. That is where we start.

Harry Halpin: The Mask Is Off the Military-Industrial Complex

Harry’s opening rant deserves to be preserved almost in full, because it sets the stakes for everything else in this episode. Karp’s vision, in his reading, is a combination of state and corporate power, the acceleration of automated AI weapons, and global surveillance over entire populations in the name of national security, all justified by the self-evident superiority of American culture. Harry concedes the one inch he thinks Karp earns (“I don’t completely disagree with everything he says… certain liberal political correctness has gone too far”) before taking the whole mile back: the warmongering, the privatized NSA with even less accountability than the actual NSA, and the view of enemies as subhuman make this “a very dangerous and authoritarian view of the future.”

His sharpest economic point is about the business model underneath the ideology. Government contracts have a 90% renewal rate, government employees are not very good at computers, and what Palantir actually sells is, in his words, effectively database joins paid for again and again forever. He connects this directly to Peter Thiel’s Zero to Oneargument that monopolies are how you make real money, and replies that monopolies historically produce political corruption and economic stagnation. Grift, basically. You can look at the current administration for examples.

Harry also dragged me personally into it, correctly: imagine Romania’s communist surveillance regime, the one that killed dissidents, except with AI, drones, and mass data aggregation. The threat model has changed because the data exhaust we spent 20 years feeding to ad networks (“this spyware that you put in your pocket every day”) is now available to nation-state-level adversaries.

And this is a Bitcoin podcast, so here is the knife twist: your transactions are stored forever on the blockchain. Harry knew Len Sassaman, and recalls Len’s critique of Bitcoin: whoever invented it did not understand the power of traffic analysis. Deanonymizing you is only the first step. Next they predict you, control you, and eventually eliminate you if your behavior drifts too far out of line. Blockchain without privacy makes all of this worse.

His positive program is the cypherpunk one: laws will not save us (they are being weaponized, see Roman Storm), so we build. Nym for anonymous networking, DarkFi for markets, Tornado Cash for transactions. Technology the way Hal Finney framed it, to help people rather than enslave them. The old anarchist vision, rebuilt for the technological age.

“But China Doesn’t Have Ethics Either”

I pushed Harry with the argument every American company hides behind: China has no regulations and no ethical qualms, so if the West insists on ethics, it loses AI, crypto, and everything else. Harry’s answer inverts the premise. American technological dominance comes from a heritage of libertarianism and parallel systems, not from copying authoritarianism.

There is a reason Russia never developed the internet and China did not invent digital money. Who built working digital cash: the PayPal mafia, or Satoshi? Innovation requires freedom of speech and freedom to self-organize, and the people who rise to the top of centralized control systems are masterful bureaucrats, not visionaries.

“You don’t beat your enemy by becoming like your enemy,” and you definitely do not beat them by murdering people, which historically just makes populations rally around their own terrible regimes. The Soviet Union had all the military in the world and collapsed anyway, because people got sick of a corrupt mafia running everything. His warning: the United States may be entering that situation fairly soon, if it is not there already.

Christopher Cialone: Inside the Roman Storm Trial

Christopher’s contribution is different in kind: he is doing court reporting as an act of solidarity, sitting through hearings in the Southern District of New York that almost nobody else in this industry bothers to attend. His assessment is blunt. This is a once or twice in a lifetime case, and “a nail in the coffin of innovation” if it stands.

The specific legal maneuver he wants everyone to understand: the government is attempting to redefine privacy by separating anonymity from privacy, while deliberately conflating secrecy with privacy so that only criminals appear to want either. At the Rule 29 hearing, which Christopher attended in person, the prosecutor went so far as to argue that legitimate users’ funds were actually illegitimate, because depositing them strengthened the anonymity pools and therefore made the system more private. Read that again.

Using the privacy tool lawfully is now evidence against you, because your lawful use helped make it work. Christopher’s read of the prosecution is chilling precisely because it is not stupid: “These are not stupid people. The prosecutor is not an idiot. He can’t be an idiot. He’s purposely confusing the lines to get a conviction”, blurring what the protocol does versus what the UI does, and inventing a duty to “shut down shop” the moment criminals touch your open source code.

Meanwhile the developer community has been more or less silent, which he finds almost as dispiriting as the case itself. And the hypocrisy is total: we spent years calling these developers martyrs of the Biden administration’s Chokepoint 2.0, then Trump freed Ross, has his own DeFi project, and… nothing. Even Roger Ver, with all his money and lawyers and connections, did not get a great deal.

Christopher’s conclusion and mine converge: politics is not going to save us, and voting for the other guy will not either. His solution is the one theme all three guests share: build parallel systems that mirror everything we have now, because technocratic feudalism is being assembled quickly and the foundations have been laid for years. And educate, because half the battle is that a generation raised after 9/11 and COVID has simply never experienced privacy. The psyop is “they know anyway, forget it,” and it is working.

I will also own my bleakest line of the episode: the day the Samourai Wallet developers were arrested is the day Bitcoin died. The chilling effect was instant. Wasabi dissolved. Mercury Wallet and its statechain coin swaps vanished. The only privacy tech that stayed fashionable is custodial ecash on Lightning, tolerated, in my view, precisely because the custodian can seize it. Privacy at the mercy of the person holding your funds is just a bank with extra steps.

Amir Taaki: If He Has a Gun, I Want a Gun

Amir’s phone froze during Harry’s segment, which is fitting, because his entire worldview is that the network is hostile and you keep transmitting anyway. His ethical framework compresses into one sentence: “If that guy’s got a gun, I want a gun. Pretty simple.” The argument is not about criminality; it is that a ruling class he describes, repeatedly and at high volume, as a “pedophile war-mongering class” has arrogated to itself the right to define morality and impose it on everyone else, and obeying laws written by those people is not virtue, it is slavery.

The tools of power exist. You can influence their direction or sit out and be dragged kicking and screaming into the future regardless. And for everyone who says privacy tools are for criminals: criminals will use them, yes, and so can you. Why wouldn’t you?

His operational update on DarkFi matters for everyone who keeps asking: the wallet app version should be out this month, the long-open question of the bridge now has a decided roadmap that just needs implementing, testnet comes soon after, then mainnet, and then he pivots to the big missing piece, marketing and raising DarkFi’s profile.

Amir has been on the show twice more, and both conversations pair well with this one. In S12 E2 he goes back to the early days of Bitcoin, and in S17 E40 he sits down with Prof. Richard Werner to talk about community banks and the coming CBDC panopticon. Listen to all three in a row and you can hear how little his message has changed, and how much less fringe it sounds every year.

Then the war stories. DarkFi has suspected agents in its chat spreading disinformation, forking the code, planting fabricated issues in repos, and passing themselves off as DarkFi developers. Amir himself has been detained for eight hours in Serbia, six in Mexico, hours in Japan, and in November, while everyone at DevConnect’s privacy dinner was waiting for him, detained at the airport in Argentina and deported to Brazil without explanation. He also notes Ray Youssef got swarmed by federal agents in Mexico City and deported.

Roman Storm, Samourai, Roger Ver, privacy people keep getting touched, and Amir reads the pattern as an instruction: “That’s what we should do more of, because that’s what they’re afraid of.” Repression does not demoralize the stubborn. It makes them dig in.

His advice for dealing with state psyops, delivered to Christopher as builder to builder, is the most practically valuable part of his segment: these tactics are designed to exhaust you with fires you constantly have to put out and to emotionally dysregulate you so you become reactive. Don’t ignore attacks, address them before they grow, but do it calmly and rationally, never get sucked into their game, and remember that shipping the product is the mission. Everything else is a side quest. “Having this mindset is the key to dealing with government psyops.”

Lavender, AIP and the Spartan Krypteia

Amir brought receipts for why this is not abstract. Two links he ordered everyone to look up: the Palantir AIP demo video on YouTube, showing the automation of military command and targeting, and “Lavender: The AI Machine Directing Israel’s Bombing Spree in Gaza” from +972 Magazine, built on insider testimony from Unit 8200describing an AI system manufacturing targets at industrial scale, including administrative and governance targets, until some of the operators themselves concluded they were supporting something inhumane and went to the press. Add modern drone platforms, a country-wide, real-time, AI-driven surveillance layer with infrared optics, and the old American consolation of “we have the right to bear arms” starts looking very thin against a state that can see everyone, everywhere, all the time.

His historical analogy was the night’s most unexpected lecture: Sparta’s Krypteia, the institution where Spartan teams would annually cull the strongest, most charismatic Helots, the ones with swagger, before they could become leaders of a revolt the outnumbered Spartans feared. It worked so well that when invaders later tried to free the Helots, they refused to insult their masters. Slavery had been internalized. That, Amir argues, is the endgame of the surveillance state, and that is why crypto is not about buying drugs or dodgy donations: it is about the preservation of culture, liberty, thought, and free spaces on the internet. His almost cheerful twist: let them drive it all underground. Boiling frogs need to feel the heat, and persecution forces us to come up with ingenious methods. He finished the segment doing laundry on stream, which I chose to interpret as agorist praxis.

The Actual Privacy Shopping List

Since Harry had to leave before the practical part, Amir, Christopher and I assembled the starter pack for listeners:

Tor Browser and Linux as the baseline. Firejail around your AI agents (Claude and friends) so they cannot rummage through your machine. GrapheneOS on the phone, a GL.iNet Mudi portable router with IMEI randomization, and disposable SIMs, because SIM-based location tracking is what Amir is actually paranoid about. Nym for mixnet-grade VPN protection. NanoGPT for pay-per-use AI access funded with Monero through an OnionMail account, no identity, no credit card, just an account number. Fileverse as a private Google Docs replacement for the non-developers, because nobody becomes an incognito commando overnight and privacy is staged.

On VPNs: avoid the NordVPN/Surfshark/ExpressVPN conglomerate sphere (Nord was breached while every YouTuber on earth was reading their ads), and prefer services like Mullvad, Nym, iVPN and VP.NET that take Bitcoin or Monero, generate an account number, and ask for no email, because if your VPN wants registration data, you are the log. Browsers: Firefox and Brave, that is the whole list. And the Amir endgame: run your own VPN off a Raspberry Pi, build your own cyberdeck, become an all-around technologist, because ease of use is exactly how they got everything else from you.

The Chaos Interlude

Because this was a live stream, the episode also contains: Harry picking 98 for the giveaway and leaving before anyone could stop him. Christopher picking 77. Amir picking 4, then dropping off again. The average landing at 59.67, rounding to 60, and Think Big Stories in the chat winning one whole ZEC courtesy of Cake Wallet. Three QR-scanning attempts defeated by GrapheneOS and bad lighting.

Amir changing shirts on camera, performing the Zcash dance, and turning the whole thing into MTV Cribs with his Lara Croft memorabilia (yes, she is why he became a programmer). A story about Ray Youssef telling a room of libertarian Bitcoiners that crypto needs “a strong leader, like a certain Austrian painter,” which cleared the room and which I include only as a document of Ray being Ray.

Elizabeth Báthory as proof that blood-drinking elites are a tradition, not an innovation. Richard Stallman as proof that weaponized autism is a superpower (his printer story, retold with reverence) and Linus Torvalds as proof that the right kind of toxic keeps a kernel lean.

Christopher’s Origin Story and the Lightning Autopsy

Christopher heard Charlie Shrem speak in 2012, walked down to the Bitcoin Center near Wall Street as a private investigator who could not code an HTML page, and spent three weeks just figuring out how to obtain bitcoin, drawn not by Silk Road but by the implications after watching the housing crisis. Today he does tech consulting and builds on Solana: shadowranch.xyz, a gamified cypherpunk coding tutorial, and an anonymous version control launchpad in early stages, because developers should not have to put everything on GitHub. His advice to everyone who complains: somebody should do something became I’ll do something, and most of his projects started exactly that way.

Amir and I also conducted the ceremonial trolling of Bitcoiners. His one-line method: “Just say anything factual and they get mad.” The lightning round, literally: Lightning failed as a mass scaling vision (El Salvador runs on custodial state wallets, exchange-reported Lightning volumes are abysmal, the big routing nodes with 100+ BTC earn crumbs in fees, and half the Lightning businesses are burning VC runway looking for a new angle), and worse, Lightning functioned culturally as a gateway drug to custodianship, normalizing “it’s hard, let someone hold it for you.”

Exhibit A: the Ukrainian custodial wallet that rugged user funds “for the war effort.” Exhibit B: BlueWallet sunsetting its custodial service and burning everyone who did not withdraw in time. My closing heresy stands: we live in a multicoin world, Bitcoin refused to give builders the opcodes, and you cannot be an institutional asset and a cypherpunk project with a straight face at the same time.

Closing Notes

Amir’s parting doctrine, equal parts menace and hope: “We have cards in our hands. I’m just not sure people realize it.” The extravagant displays of violence against particular individuals, the airport detentions, the show trials, these are not signs of strength. A confident power does not overreact. They are afraid, precisely of the tools discussed in this episode, which is the best argument I have heard all year for building them faster.

Christopher can be followed at CialoneCodes on X, where he covers the Storm case and the Samourai pardon push. Go support Roman Storm, because as Harry said before running off, it is honorable work to defend people in their darkest hours, and if you do not, it is going to be you next.

This episode is sponsored by Cake Wallet (who made the 1 ZEC giveaway possible and survived three GrapheneOS phones live on air), Sideshift.ai (swap whatever someone paid you that you do not actually want into BTC; not available in the US), Braiins Hashpower (rent SHA256 hashrate for lottery mining or, theoretically, a 51% attack on BSV; don’t sue me Craig, I am just saying you can), Orange Rock (the Bitcoin.com team’s no-account trading platform, Hyperliquid but nicer), and LayerTwo Labs (drivechains on signet: big blocks, Zcash-style fungibility, assets, all waiting for BIP 300).

Special thanks to all the sponsors for making this freely available to everyone!

Listen to Harry Halpin, Amir Taaki & Christopher Cialone on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts & More!

Time stamps:

00:00:00 – Intro music
00:01:13 – Three guests, one knife, zero preparation
00:01:54 – Sponsors & the 1 ZEC giveaway rules
00:02:17 – Harry takes the floor: the mask is off
00:02:40 – The Technological Republic & the 22-point manifesto
00:03:55 – A privatized NSA with even less accountability
00:05:09 – Zuckerberg MMA cosplay & the warrior fetish
00:06:15 – Communist Romania with AI and drones
00:07:32 – Laws are weaponized; build anti-surveillance tech
00:08:23 – Hal Finney: help people, don’t enslave them
00:09:25 – Aggregation + AI: the threat model has changed
00:11:13 – What Palantir leaves out: ad-tech became state-tech
00:12:27 – Len Sassaman on Bitcoin & traffic analysis
00:13:52 – The Anti-Palantir Manifesto
00:16:37 – 90% renewal rates & the database-joins business model
00:17:10 – Thiel’s monopoly fetish breeds corruption
00:18:33 – “But China has no ethics”: the geopolitical excuse
00:19:37 – Innovation comes from freedom, not control
00:20:31 – Satoshi built digital money, not the PayPal mafia
00:22:08 – Don’t beat your enemy by becoming your enemy
00:23:53 – The Soviet collapse lesson
00:24:34 – Christopher: Roman Storm, a once-in-a-lifetime case
00:25:09 – Redefining privacy: anonymity vs privacy vs secrecy
00:26:22 – Rule 29: legitimate users made the pools illegitimate
00:27:12 – The developer community’s silence
00:28:24 – The judge, the coin flip & the Samourai pardon push
00:29:19 – Bitcoin Fog: oral arguments in March, 5 years in prison
00:29:44 – Build parallel systems that mirror everything
00:30:09 – Governments versus their own people
00:32:18 – A generation that has never known privacy
00:33:58 – Scammers get pardons, builders get prosecuted
00:35:27 – Harry: they want better banking databases, not crypto
00:38:00 – Financial privacy is freedom of expression
00:39:05 – Post-COVID New York: death of the rebel spirit
00:40:16 – Prosecutors blur UI and protocol on purpose
00:41:15 – “If you built this, they’re coming for you”
00:44:13 – Pay-to-play justice & the Trump token counterfactual
00:44:38 – Harry’s exit & the 0.33 ZEC split
00:49:49 – The day Bitcoin privacy died: the Samourai effect
00:50:23 – Wasabi dissolved, Mercury vanished, ecash tolerated
00:53:19 – Amir: if he has a gun, I want a gun
00:54:16 – Who actually benefits from the wars?
00:56:03 – One political class, two-party theater
00:58:03 – Roaming the dark forest as a sovereign beast
01:00:35 – Agents in the DarkFi chat: the info war is real
01:01:13 – Detained in Serbia, Mexico, Japan: a pattern
01:02:13 – DarkFi update: wallet app, bridge, testnet, mainnet
01:03:34 – Deported from Argentina to Brazil, no reason given
01:05:16 – Ray Youssef & the Mexico City federales
01:06:03 – Repression is a signal: do more of what they fear
01:11:20 – Amir on psyops: never get emotionally dysregulated
01:13:27 – Ship the product; everything else is a side quest
01:19:06 – The privacy arms race & best practices
01:21:01 – The vampiric elite & their plasma habits
01:22:08 – Don’t let a war-mongering class define your morality
01:24:17 – Who controls semiconductors controls AI
01:26:18 – Watch Palantir’s AIP demo on YouTube
01:27:42 – Lavender: +972 on AI-directed bombing
01:29:16 – Drones: a real-time Google Maps of death
01:32:01 – The Spartan Krypteia: culling the charismatic
01:33:15 – The Helots who refused to insult their masters
01:35:14 – The golden age of local open source AI
01:36:28 – Practical privacy 101: Tor, Linux, Firejail
01:37:33 – GrapheneOS, IMEI randomization & the Mudi router
01:38:25 – NanoGPT + OnionMail + Monero
01:40:19 – VPN hygiene: the Nord conglomerate problem
01:43:52 – Browsers: Firefox and Brave, that’s the list
01:44:09 – The shirt change & the Zcash dance
01:48:00 – Giveaway logistics vs GrapheneOS
01:49:05 – ETH Denver: smaller, and all about AI agents
01:53:41 – Full sponsor read
01:57:49 – Zashi is now ZODL: the ECC fork story
02:00:52 – Tornado Cash was always Zcash on Ethereum
02:02:15 – Schneier’s Applied Cryptography & Zooko’s ZK explainer
02:03:43 – The Monero people love Amir (surprise)
02:04:34 – Lara Croft: the origin of programmer Amir
02:06:11 – Ray Youssef’s “strong leader” bit clears the room
02:08:04 – The numbers: 98, 77 and 4
02:12:04 – Christopher’s origin: PI work, 2012, Charlie Shrem
02:16:30 – Watch The Rise and Rise of Bitcoin
02:17:30 – Hijacking Bitcoin: the childhood sweetheart betrayal
02:20:37 – Think Big Stories wins 1 ZEC
02:21:59 – Laundry day with Amir
02:23:06 – Elizabeth Báthory & the noble class
02:26:03 – Richard Stallman: weaponized autism as superpower
02:30:09 – How to troll Bitcoiners: just state facts
02:30:34 – Lightning failed (objectively, pick your metric)
02:33:39 – The wallet that rugged users “for the war effort”
02:35:42 – Accept the multicoin world
02:36:07 – Institutional asset or cypherpunk project: pick one
02:40:19 – Christopher exits; follow CialoneCodes
02:41:47 – Outro & final sponsor thanks