Iran Will Lift The Bitcoin Mining Ban Next Month: Report

Iran will lift the bitcoin mining ban at the end of next month as earlier this year, the country is responsible for an estimated 4.5% of BTC mining globally as we are reading more in our latest Bitcoin news today.

Iran paused BTC mining in May for four months due to the power shortages as the country legalized and started regulating crypto mining in 2019. Iran will lift the Bitcoin mining ban in September according to the reports from the Iranian Student’s News Agency that was picked up by the Iranian English news site Financial Tribune. President Hassan Rouhani placed the temporary prohibition in place as the country’s electrical grid came under fire due to high temperatures and energy shortages.

In today’s declaration from the Iran Power Generation the Distribution and Transmission Company spokesperson Mostafa Rajabi Mashhadi said that the Ministry of Industries, Mining and Trade plans to stick to the original resumption date rather than extend the moratorium. The Financial Tribune reports that Mashhadi said Tavanir hopes that the electricity use will ease in the coming month so that the miners can continue operations. This could lead to a bigger bump in the BTC blockchain hashrate, as a measure of the power dedicated to the network. Iran was responsible for an estimated 4.5%  of all BTC mining using the data from Tavanir and the Cambridge University Center for Alternative Finance. If mining was able to continue, the percentage increased during the summer when China clamped down to the crypto miners and sent the network’s hashrate crashing.

BTC mining is a regulated activity in Iran that found plenty of innovative ways to get around the US sanctions. The country which is rich in oil and natural gas found itself with a few buyers as the Trump Administration abandoned a multilateral nuclear agreement in 2018 and put pressure on other countries to stop dealing with the Islamic Republic. With the dollar reserve shrinking, Iran legalized crypto mining in 2019 and started putting taxes on it which helped offset the country’s massive electricity subsidies. The next year, the country mandated that crypto miners sell their rewards to the Central bank of Iran. Though Iran ranks in the top five countries for the inexpensive electricity thanks to teh larger stores of gas and oil, this year’s blackouts only showed that its national electrical grid is not accustomed to handling high electrical demand.