Iran building a machine for converting cheap energy into hard currency is what the alchemists of the Middle Ages dreamt of when trying to convert base metals into gold.
Iran proved that the Bitcoin market can be manipulated, that Bitcoin is not the tangible type of currency that can be measured and tracked, and that enemy actors can utilize this market to skim billions of dollars in value from other countries in trade.
This does not prove that Bitcoin is a secure asset. It proves that Bitcoin is an extremely dangerous asset. An asset opaque to the outside world, unable to be quantified in a manner that allows for proper functioning of supply and demand mechanisms, and yes, of government oversight, is not one that should be recommended.
The sheer number of shady characters and indeed of shady nations involved in the Bitcoin empire is a key reason that it should simply be wound down and shutdown permanently, for national security and international security reasons.
So, I assume (based upon very little "bitcoin" knowledge), that as long as I have a "wallet" with my "access code", even if my usual ability to access is denied because the grid is down, I can get access when I get somewhere there is power. Is that correct? Given the size of this financial operation, and its reliance on...cyber connectivity...hard to believe major players (China, U.S., NK, Russia) were not aware. I'd guess someone got burned early on due to bitcoin security issues (Canada says they can "track every transaction made", not making that up) and a cascading failure event that is still ongoing is the result. Thoughts?
It is highly probable that Iran is rushing to liquidate its crypto-assets as a desperate survival measure, yet one might infer that U.S. intelligence has already mapped and narrowed these exit routes with surgical precision. Given the current volatility, it stands to reason that the upcoming U.S.-China summit is being leveraged to broker a comprehensive arrangement—one that likely encompasses the future management and containment of Iran’s clandestine crypto-settlement protocols. Could the tactical postponement of this summit be the result of a cold, behind-the-scenes adjustment of these complex deal parameters, rather than a mere scheduling conflict?
Ironically, this would make renewable energy worth investing in for Iran. I supposed solar can be destroyed by bombs, but that would seem to be the highest level of energy unethicalness imagineable.
So there is a theory that basically combines austrian economics and engineering.
Engineering studies work, power, and energy by using the abstraction of a 'system'. Work moves across the boundaries of the system in specific ways and specific amounts. Engineering homework in those disciplines includes paying some very careful attention to in what ways, adn in what amounts.
Accounting is a set of practices that can allow a large organization to estimate their total costs associated with a choice. Well, what are the correct measurement points for certain choices? Austrian economics thinks that the best samples, or measurements are always the hypothetical unforced transactions of a free market. To the extent that there are other interventions, they are 'distortions', that corrupt the estimate.
If you were to only combine Austrian economics, and engineering, one might conclude that this means that a fair or non-fraudulent set of books needs to be kept in both currencies to properly evaluate the choice. (I've been sure that a third currency is also needed for maybe as long as twenty years.)
Austrian economics is generally quite willing to be paranoid about hidden effects that take effect instantly and invisibly, and change the true valuations of things. This naturally might admit the speculation that the different 'sources' of energy do not at all have the same value.
If you are familiar with electrical engineering, and with mechanical engineering, there is some basic analysis that shows that solar and wind and electrical transmission tends to require some fossil fuel capacity, and you could do the fossil fuel stuff more efficiently if you just skipped the solar and wind. Or, if you have zero wind and zero solar, you can just build almost all of the capacity as fission.
That Iran is not spending on solar and wind is itself an argument that those are not investments. (If renewables are basically a fraud that replaces fossil fuels with fossil fuels plus energy wasted in 'renewables', then a government that wants energy for economic reasons might just skip the renewables. )
Basically, if solar and wind are kept after politics removes the tax credits, then they are maybe not a 100% waste.
Blowing renewables into debris is maybe not that much more wasteful than scrapping them as junk, or than building them in the first place.
Theory is theory, and test is test.
If we were really close to an energy transition, there are some machine adoptions we would have seen some years ago. We did not see those.
If you have to shoot people to coerce machine adoptions, then you have probably misestimated the true economic value of your proposed changes in machinery.
WOW! This was VERY informative. I have not delved into cryptocurrencies, but now I get it. With a little knowledge of computing, the internet, and VPN, your explanation becomes very clear. I think @DirectorBlue should be able to create an infographic to break it down to key points.
DDale, the issue with Conservatives NEEDING a parallel economy is the potential for radical Democrats to Debank you. It happened to Trump and Nigel Farage as they both were debanked. This should be a part of the conversation because even PayPal considered fining people for distributing misinformation. The war against free speech is ongoing!
Using local gas for bitcoin mining adds some additional context to the Israeli strike on the South Pars gas field and why Iran reacted so furiously to it
80% of that article may as well as have been in Russian to me! I cannot, for the life of me, grasp exactly what Bitcoin even is, or does, or if it even actually exists except in some bizarre hyper-tech conceptualization.
Bitcoin isn’t something that tangibly exists, yet it somehow gets converted into actual money? Or is the money not actually real either?
So everyone is just playing around with pretend money which can’t be traced that only exists as long as someone doesn’t pull the plug?
Maybe all money, or most of what’s “on the books” in this day and age isn’t really there either? What the heck have we done to ourselves? Everything’s built upon a house of cards.
There are two elements to this. One is fairly conventional theory of money supply, economics. I like the Austrian school or maybe the Chicago school myself.
Academically, the Austrian school is classified as a heterodox (not standard, or not consensus) model. This is basically because they tend to reject statistical estimations, which everyone else uses. Austrians ask 'what if everything can float', and have a broad view of information that may be misleading and useless. They think that people are lying least with voluntary transactions on a free market. But, if you add up the accounts for a hundred companies for their estimation book valuations, they can be jiggered in ways you don't know about. Austrians think that the jiggering can change in new and unknown ways very rapidly.
So, in some schools of economics two decades ago, it was known that the money supply is weird, and probably involves a bunch of electronic loans between reserve banks.
The other thing is cryptocurrency. These are electronic records that allegedly have special mathematical properties.
If people want these records, and want to exchange them, they become money, per some understandings of economics. The crypto people take these two previous sentences as established.
The key document of the mathematical theory was written by a Satoshi Nakamoto, who it may be fair to say never existed. It is someone's pen name, and that may have been the NSA or a similar organization.
So, yes, maybe money was never real, maybe it was always a fiction whose reality is created human belief. But if humans are alive, they want to eat, and currencies are easier than every transaction as bartering. Human populations will tend to back reality of some currencies, but that doesn't mean that all currencies retain value. Currencies often die when the banks and mints print too many bills because governments require them to.
Bitcoin is one of several cryptocurrencies that haven't failed or gotten shut down.
I don't at all understand Bitcoin. Wikipedia may say something like it is a 'proof of work' cryptocurrency?
There is a type of cryptocurrency that builds its math around requiring someone to spend a bunch of computer time on calculations. Doing these calculations is called mining, and basically takes a lot of power and hardware.
AI basically took off when there was a decline in cryptocurrency mining, and otherwise video cards might have gotten cheaper.
If you think of Bitcoin as “value” that is recognized and transferred via a computer and the internet, you are half way there. Without the energy to run the computers and without access to the internet, you cannot access the “value”. That means you cannot use the “value” to transact a sell or a purchase even if you hold the “value”.
While our government is trying to establish regulations to “control” cryptocurrency, Iran has perfected its use in trade sidestepping U.S. dollar sanctions. Further, because Iran is gaining more “value” because it can sell more than it purchases, it has influenced the unit value of a Bitcoin.
Much as companies will split their stocks, doubling or tripling the number, when the stock price becomes too high (the value of the stock unit is then halved or reduced to a third), Bitcoin was likewise split to encourage growth.
Throughout this entire article I was asking myself 'what the he!! is AMUSE talking about? I have every question you asked and every thought you have. An imaginary coin, backed by a dollar, US I am assuming, that isn't backed by anything either. I simply do not get it.
The thought kept going through my mind about what John wrote in 3:8 about the wind, as something you hear but cannot trace its origin or destination. I kind of know what that verse is describing, yet the Holy Spirit is itself another concept relying purely on faith.
I have faith in the trinity. I don't have faith in a bitcoin. Or the dollar for that matter.
President Trump originally did not support cryptocurrency until the Biden administration debased the dollar through inflation which is basically printing money. You’ve heard of quantitative easing? I’ve never seen inflation ever reigned in after the Fed flooded dollars into the economy. President Trump started talking about creating a parallel economy where people could buy and sell without being tracked. Cryptocurrency is an investment option that can offer protection against a currency collapse of the dollar. Think Weimar Republic. I still think crypto has an unsettling history and reputation, but lots of people think the same about the Stock Market. https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/03/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-establishes-the-strategic-bitcoin-reserve-and-u-s-digital-asset-stockpile/
Wow, it’s amazing to read your articles about subjects never mentioned in other media (that I’m aware of) and give such a detailed accounting. Your knowledge and expertise is very valuable and interesting. Here’s hoping Iran’s future is bright with the regime and IRGC destroyed. Iranians deserve freedom and to be enriched by their country’s resources instead of terrorism funding.
Is there a cheap domestic source of lots of electricity, plus a method to buy and transfer the computing hardware to someplace you control? Is there cooling available?
In some countries these are available, but in some others one or more is lacking and it's not really possible to remedy the lack.
I suspect most of Africa lacks the cheap domestic source of electricity for instance. Solar needs lots of secure space, which is likely why there isn't more there.
Very informative essay
Iran building a machine for converting cheap energy into hard currency is what the alchemists of the Middle Ages dreamt of when trying to convert base metals into gold.
Iran proved that the Bitcoin market can be manipulated, that Bitcoin is not the tangible type of currency that can be measured and tracked, and that enemy actors can utilize this market to skim billions of dollars in value from other countries in trade.
This does not prove that Bitcoin is a secure asset. It proves that Bitcoin is an extremely dangerous asset. An asset opaque to the outside world, unable to be quantified in a manner that allows for proper functioning of supply and demand mechanisms, and yes, of government oversight, is not one that should be recommended.
The sheer number of shady characters and indeed of shady nations involved in the Bitcoin empire is a key reason that it should simply be wound down and shutdown permanently, for national security and international security reasons.
So, I assume (based upon very little "bitcoin" knowledge), that as long as I have a "wallet" with my "access code", even if my usual ability to access is denied because the grid is down, I can get access when I get somewhere there is power. Is that correct? Given the size of this financial operation, and its reliance on...cyber connectivity...hard to believe major players (China, U.S., NK, Russia) were not aware. I'd guess someone got burned early on due to bitcoin security issues (Canada says they can "track every transaction made", not making that up) and a cascading failure event that is still ongoing is the result. Thoughts?
Interesting points and entertaining, despite the feeling of GenAI “not X, but Y” prose throughout.
It is highly probable that Iran is rushing to liquidate its crypto-assets as a desperate survival measure, yet one might infer that U.S. intelligence has already mapped and narrowed these exit routes with surgical precision. Given the current volatility, it stands to reason that the upcoming U.S.-China summit is being leveraged to broker a comprehensive arrangement—one that likely encompasses the future management and containment of Iran’s clandestine crypto-settlement protocols. Could the tactical postponement of this summit be the result of a cold, behind-the-scenes adjustment of these complex deal parameters, rather than a mere scheduling conflict?
Ironically, this would make renewable energy worth investing in for Iran. I supposed solar can be destroyed by bombs, but that would seem to be the highest level of energy unethicalness imagineable.
So there is a theory that basically combines austrian economics and engineering.
Engineering studies work, power, and energy by using the abstraction of a 'system'. Work moves across the boundaries of the system in specific ways and specific amounts. Engineering homework in those disciplines includes paying some very careful attention to in what ways, adn in what amounts.
Accounting is a set of practices that can allow a large organization to estimate their total costs associated with a choice. Well, what are the correct measurement points for certain choices? Austrian economics thinks that the best samples, or measurements are always the hypothetical unforced transactions of a free market. To the extent that there are other interventions, they are 'distortions', that corrupt the estimate.
If you were to only combine Austrian economics, and engineering, one might conclude that this means that a fair or non-fraudulent set of books needs to be kept in both currencies to properly evaluate the choice. (I've been sure that a third currency is also needed for maybe as long as twenty years.)
Austrian economics is generally quite willing to be paranoid about hidden effects that take effect instantly and invisibly, and change the true valuations of things. This naturally might admit the speculation that the different 'sources' of energy do not at all have the same value.
If you are familiar with electrical engineering, and with mechanical engineering, there is some basic analysis that shows that solar and wind and electrical transmission tends to require some fossil fuel capacity, and you could do the fossil fuel stuff more efficiently if you just skipped the solar and wind. Or, if you have zero wind and zero solar, you can just build almost all of the capacity as fission.
That Iran is not spending on solar and wind is itself an argument that those are not investments. (If renewables are basically a fraud that replaces fossil fuels with fossil fuels plus energy wasted in 'renewables', then a government that wants energy for economic reasons might just skip the renewables. )
Basically, if solar and wind are kept after politics removes the tax credits, then they are maybe not a 100% waste.
Blowing renewables into debris is maybe not that much more wasteful than scrapping them as junk, or than building them in the first place.
Theory is theory, and test is test.
If we were really close to an energy transition, there are some machine adoptions we would have seen some years ago. We did not see those.
If you have to shoot people to coerce machine adoptions, then you have probably misestimated the true economic value of your proposed changes in machinery.
WOW! This was VERY informative. I have not delved into cryptocurrencies, but now I get it. With a little knowledge of computing, the internet, and VPN, your explanation becomes very clear. I think @DirectorBlue should be able to create an infographic to break it down to key points.
DDale, the issue with Conservatives NEEDING a parallel economy is the potential for radical Democrats to Debank you. It happened to Trump and Nigel Farage as they both were debanked. This should be a part of the conversation because even PayPal considered fining people for distributing misinformation. The war against free speech is ongoing!
Using local gas for bitcoin mining adds some additional context to the Israeli strike on the South Pars gas field and why Iran reacted so furiously to it
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/18/oil-prices-surge-after-israeli-strike-on-iran-gasfield-irans-threats
80% of that article may as well as have been in Russian to me! I cannot, for the life of me, grasp exactly what Bitcoin even is, or does, or if it even actually exists except in some bizarre hyper-tech conceptualization.
Bitcoin isn’t something that tangibly exists, yet it somehow gets converted into actual money? Or is the money not actually real either?
So everyone is just playing around with pretend money which can’t be traced that only exists as long as someone doesn’t pull the plug?
Maybe all money, or most of what’s “on the books” in this day and age isn’t really there either? What the heck have we done to ourselves? Everything’s built upon a house of cards.
That is truly scary.
There are two elements to this. One is fairly conventional theory of money supply, economics. I like the Austrian school or maybe the Chicago school myself.
Academically, the Austrian school is classified as a heterodox (not standard, or not consensus) model. This is basically because they tend to reject statistical estimations, which everyone else uses. Austrians ask 'what if everything can float', and have a broad view of information that may be misleading and useless. They think that people are lying least with voluntary transactions on a free market. But, if you add up the accounts for a hundred companies for their estimation book valuations, they can be jiggered in ways you don't know about. Austrians think that the jiggering can change in new and unknown ways very rapidly.
So, in some schools of economics two decades ago, it was known that the money supply is weird, and probably involves a bunch of electronic loans between reserve banks.
The other thing is cryptocurrency. These are electronic records that allegedly have special mathematical properties.
If people want these records, and want to exchange them, they become money, per some understandings of economics. The crypto people take these two previous sentences as established.
The key document of the mathematical theory was written by a Satoshi Nakamoto, who it may be fair to say never existed. It is someone's pen name, and that may have been the NSA or a similar organization.
So, yes, maybe money was never real, maybe it was always a fiction whose reality is created human belief. But if humans are alive, they want to eat, and currencies are easier than every transaction as bartering. Human populations will tend to back reality of some currencies, but that doesn't mean that all currencies retain value. Currencies often die when the banks and mints print too many bills because governments require them to.
Bitcoin is one of several cryptocurrencies that haven't failed or gotten shut down.
I don't at all understand Bitcoin. Wikipedia may say something like it is a 'proof of work' cryptocurrency?
There is a type of cryptocurrency that builds its math around requiring someone to spend a bunch of computer time on calculations. Doing these calculations is called mining, and basically takes a lot of power and hardware.
AI basically took off when there was a decline in cryptocurrency mining, and otherwise video cards might have gotten cheaper.
If you think of Bitcoin as “value” that is recognized and transferred via a computer and the internet, you are half way there. Without the energy to run the computers and without access to the internet, you cannot access the “value”. That means you cannot use the “value” to transact a sell or a purchase even if you hold the “value”.
While our government is trying to establish regulations to “control” cryptocurrency, Iran has perfected its use in trade sidestepping U.S. dollar sanctions. Further, because Iran is gaining more “value” because it can sell more than it purchases, it has influenced the unit value of a Bitcoin.
Much as companies will split their stocks, doubling or tripling the number, when the stock price becomes too high (the value of the stock unit is then halved or reduced to a third), Bitcoin was likewise split to encourage growth.
I love you Suzie.
Throughout this entire article I was asking myself 'what the he!! is AMUSE talking about? I have every question you asked and every thought you have. An imaginary coin, backed by a dollar, US I am assuming, that isn't backed by anything either. I simply do not get it.
The thought kept going through my mind about what John wrote in 3:8 about the wind, as something you hear but cannot trace its origin or destination. I kind of know what that verse is describing, yet the Holy Spirit is itself another concept relying purely on faith.
I have faith in the trinity. I don't have faith in a bitcoin. Or the dollar for that matter.
President Trump originally did not support cryptocurrency until the Biden administration debased the dollar through inflation which is basically printing money. You’ve heard of quantitative easing? I’ve never seen inflation ever reigned in after the Fed flooded dollars into the economy. President Trump started talking about creating a parallel economy where people could buy and sell without being tracked. Cryptocurrency is an investment option that can offer protection against a currency collapse of the dollar. Think Weimar Republic. I still think crypto has an unsettling history and reputation, but lots of people think the same about the Stock Market. https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/03/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-establishes-the-strategic-bitcoin-reserve-and-u-s-digital-asset-stockpile/
Trump was debanked ergo his opinion of bitcoin changed
Experience changes perspective.
I’m with you, Suzie.
China is the top country mining bitcoin.
Wow, it’s amazing to read your articles about subjects never mentioned in other media (that I’m aware of) and give such a detailed accounting. Your knowledge and expertise is very valuable and interesting. Here’s hoping Iran’s future is bright with the regime and IRGC destroyed. Iranians deserve freedom and to be enriched by their country’s resources instead of terrorism funding.
I mean, honestly, if EVERY country isn’t doing this, why aren’t they???
Is there a cheap domestic source of lots of electricity, plus a method to buy and transfer the computing hardware to someplace you control? Is there cooling available?
In some countries these are available, but in some others one or more is lacking and it's not really possible to remedy the lack.
I suspect most of Africa lacks the cheap domestic source of electricity for instance. Solar needs lots of secure space, which is likely why there isn't more there.
energy has a cost
energy spent on mining has an opportunity cost