I don’t usually copy the whole article, but this one asks you to make an account to access it, and archive.is can’t get the full article. The site has this bug where you can see the whole thing for a second, but then it locks. I managed to select everything and copy it during that time! ~lol

by Colin Harper

2026 is like a deranged circus that keeps getting weirded, and the most recent act features the intersection of the most consequential geopolitical event since COVID with bitcoin.

Shortly after Iran and the U.S. agreed to a two-week ceasefire, Iranian officials reportedly agreed to let oil tankers pass through the Strait of Hormuz – if the crews pay a toll in bitcoin.

The Financial Times broke the news, quoting Hamid Hosseini of Iran’s Oil, Gas and Petrochemical Products Exporters’ Union.

“Iran needs to monitor what goes in and out of the strait to ensure these two weeks aren’t used for transferring weapons,” Hosseini told FT. “Once the email arrives and Iran completes its assessment, vessels are given a few seconds to pay in bitcoin, ensuring they can’t be traced or confiscated due to sanctions.”

The going rate is $1 per barrel of oil, meaning a supertanker would have to cough up $2 million to pass through. The Financial Times, citing data from Kpler, said that there are some 175 million barrels of crude oil marooned on 187 tankers in the Strait. This would make for a cool $175 million payday for Iran.

Roughly 20% of the world’s oil is shipped through the Strait of Hormuz, per EIA data, which works out to about 7.3 billion barrels annually. So if Iran continues this policy and tankers actually pay, that’s $7.3 billion (or 2% of the country’s GDP) per year in Iran’s coffers.

For the layman who might have trouble picking out Iran on a map, this all very likely puzzling. For Bitcoiners, it might come as less of a shock, but the more in-the-know ones might also remember that Iran temporarily banned bitcoin mining five years ago.

This contradiction – that a nation seemingly hostile to bitcoin would also accept it for export duties in arguably the most salient example of nation state bitcoin adoption yet – exposes a messy truth: Iran, a nation yoked by a theocratic dictatorship, is a bitcoin country.

Iran’s two-tiered bitcoin mining industry
It’s a bitcoin country, but only for the few.

Iran put restrictions on bitcoin mining in 2021 in response to rolling blackouts. The government has eased these stop-gap restrictions since then and created a legal framework for mining bitcoin, although trading and transacting cryptocurrency is illegal in the country, so all miners must immediately sell their bitcoin for Iranian rials.

Luxor’s Hashrate Index data estimates that Iran constitutes 0.84% of Bitcoin’s global hashrate, roughly 9 EH/s. If Iranian bitcoin miners are using older generation machines like the Antminer S9, this could mean bitcoin mining consumes nearly 1 GW in Iran; if they are using newer ASICs like the S21 (which is unlikely, but not impossible), this puts Iran’s mining footprint closer to 160 MW.

And even the higher end estimate using Luxor’s data could be on the lower end for the actual mining activity in Iran. The Persian news outlet Wana quoted a Tehran electricity official in November 2025 who said that illegal miners alone make up 1.4 GW of demand in Iran. In an April 2025 Blockspace Podcast, Misah Alavi, an Iranian bitcoin miner and the CEO of VeraMiner, said that there’s as much as 2 GW of illegal bitcoin mining in Iran versus just 5 MW of registered, legal bitcoin mining in the region (legal miners are subject to a hefty energy fee instead of the usual subsidized rate, driving many to operate in the shadows).

These figures are complicated by the fact that the Iranian government has its own bitcoin mining operations. NCRI reported that Iranian officials accounted for over 50% of the country’s bitcoin mining footprint in 2023. One notable example included a 175 MW farm in a joint venture with Chinese nationals, a partnership that the NCRI says is common given Iranian energy subsidies that give Iran some of the lowest fuel and electricity prices in the world.

Iran showcases bitcoin adoption on the fringe
The NCRI article says that bitcoin mining revenue “compensate[s] for Iran’s loss of access to dollars” brought on by Western sanctions.

Chainanalysis estimates that Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) wallets received just over $3 billion inflows in 2025. Bitcoin – and crypto broadly – are a financial bridge for the Iranian government, and they use it for international trade, including for weapons systems. They’ve also reportedly used cryptocurrency to fund militant groups in its proxy conflicts with Israel and the US in Lebanon and Yemen.

Iranian citizens use bitcoin to the same end, specifically to access goods and services online that they otherwise can’t thanks to sanctions. One Iranian bitcoiner told me, for example, that he uses bitcoin to purchase Playstation store credits. On top of this, bitcoin is also a liferaft to navigate the torrential inflation that has eroded the rial’s value by 90% since 2018, the year that began the most recent round of sanctions against the country.

Given all of this, it should come as no surprise that Iran houses at least 1,100 cryptocurrency nodes, according to data from cybersecurity firm RAKIA. These nodes were operating during a nationwide blackout in Iran, so it’s likely that they are tied to government officials.

Moreover, transactions that were broadcasted from these nodes picked up when hostilities kicked up in Iran, suggesting that officials – the government itself and/or individuals – were moving funds.

“We’ve seen a surge of funds since the first hours of the war. It started with tens of millions in the first hours, and it grew to hundreds of millions and more. Money was just flowing out from Iranian crypto accounts,” RAKIA CEO Omri Raiter told Fox News.

With all of this in mind, it’s easier to see why Iran would turn to bitcoin to not waste a good crisis. Bitcoin was built to be cockroach money, to ensure financial survival under the most extreme edge cases. Iranian officials and citizens have turned to it to work around Western sanctions before, and they are doing so again now – and in a way that wants to disrupt the global, dollar-driven trade paradigm.

And for that, Iran is perhaps the most salient example of a bitcoin country we have. That may be uncomfortable to admit, but that doesn’t make it any less true, doesn’t change the impact of the bitcoin oil toll, and doesn’t mean that we should endorse the Iranian government’s adoption of it, either – bitcoin is money for enemies, after all.