Ask five analysts how much Bitcoin Iran really holds and you get five wildly different answers. What they agree on is that most of the country’s hashpower now hums away out of sight, making numbers a guessing game.

Hashrate Highs and Rapid Retreat

Cambridge researchers once pegged Iran’s share of global Bitcoin mining at a hefty 7.5% in March 2021, enough to rank among the network’s top five hubs. By early 2022, that slice had withered to barely 0.1%, squeezed by rising electricity tariffs and periodic police raids. Yet estimates of total coins mined over the years still range from 60,000 BTC to as much as 200,000 BTC, worth between $6 billion and $21 billion at today’s prices.

Why So Much Off-Grid

Legal farms must sell every freshly minted coin to the Central Bank of Iran. To bypass that and keep their profits, miners large and small bury rigs in places that enjoy subsidised or free power: steel plants, schools, even mosques. The state utility Tavanir reckons some 700,000 unlicensed machines are active. Their draw helps trigger blackouts, prompting bounty programs that pay citizens to snitch on illicit farms.

Because Bitcoin blocks reveal nothing about where the winning hash was generated, Tehran can route coins around American sanctions without leaving fingerprints —one reason the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is widely believed to run sizeable industrial farms. Social media gossip even placed rigs inside the fortified Fordow nuclear complex after a U.S. strike briefly knocked global hashrate 28% lower, though researchers say short-term data is too noisy to prove the claim.

For Iran’s ordinary citizens, meanwhile, a second-hand ASIC in the basement is often a hedge against 38% inflation and a collapsing rial—proof that, whatever the true tally, underground mining is set to stay.