The US attacks on Iran caused a debate about Bitcoin Hashrate and market stability

Some observers noted that even if Iran controlled 5 percent of the world’s hashrate, the network would continue to operate unhindered.

Bitcoin mining in Iran after a viral post by X on February 27 claimed that the country was running a $1 billion operation that could be taken down.

The debate has divided crypto watchers, with some warning of a temporary hit to hashrate and others dismissing the claims as fear of exaggeration, uncertainty and doubt (FUD).

Iran’s mining footprint and strike scenario

The debate began when independent analyst Shanaka Anslem Perera posted that Iran was mining bitcoin at a theoretical cost of $1,320 per BTC using subsidized electricity and then selling it at the current price of nearly $68,000 for what he described as a gross margin of 50 times.

He claimed that about 700,000 mining rigs consume about 2,000 megawatts per day, much of which is linked to operations linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC.

Perera attributed this fact to the sanctions and said that bitcoin allows Iran to convert limited energy resources into liquid capital outside the limits of SWIFT.

A Jan. 16 report by Chainalysis showed that Iran’s total crypto activity in 2025 was more than $7.78 billion. Furthermore, the report says that addresses linked to IRGC facilitation networks received more than $3 billion last year, a figure slightly above $2 billion in 2024, and that this activity often increases during military or political crises.

However, critics were quick to question the mining cost estimates, with analyst Dasha calling the $1,320 figure “100% fake news” and claiming it was based on household electricity tariffs that could not be achieved in practice due to blackouts and shortages.

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Hashrate shocks are not new

The protests didn’t stop there, as miner ZynxBTC completely dismissed the concerns:

“Even if Iran controlled 5% of the world’s hashrate (it doesn’t) and it was offline, the network would function normally.”

Recent events in the US support this argument. At the beginning of the year, the network continued to operate even after a severe winter storm forced major Texas miners to go offline, reducing the hashrate from 1,133 ZH/s to 690 EH/s in a matter of days.

However, Perera argued that a network failure is different from a voluntary shutdown. According to his analysis, as tensions rise in the Middle East, a 7- to 10-day airstrike targeting Iranian military infrastructure would likely reduce power generation by 30 to 50 percent.

He insisted that mining rigs need constant power and that even a short outage can destroy active operations. As such, he believes that a strike on Iran’s already vulnerable network could reduce the country’s estimated 2 to 5 percent of global hashrate to zero within days, triggering a difficult fix that would extend the shutdown period and temporarily increase transaction fees. As Crypto potato According to reports, the United States and Israel have already attacked Iran this morning.

However, others have argued that the Bitcoin network has withstood even bigger shocks, and researcher Furkan Yildirim noted that China removed more than half of the world’s hashrate in 2021, but the network quickly adjusted as miners moved.

He wrote on Twitter that “the collapse of Iran’s network would be a comprehensive mistake in comparison”.