Aliabadi said that Iran is determined to crack down on the illegal use of electricity for mining cryptocurrencies, saying the 12-day war with Israel exposed how much the country’s electrical grid had been suffering from cryptomining activities.
“The amount of global bitcoin production declined by nearly 5% in the days in which the country’s internet was facing restrictions due to security reasons,” he said.
Iran cut internet services and switched to a domestic intranet network on June 18, five days after the Israeli regime launched its aggression on the country.
The internet blackout came after reports showed that Israeli attacks on senior Iranian military commanders and nuclear scientists had been facilitated by devices and applications linked to the internet.
Iran’s state electricity company Tavanir released data on Sunday showing that an estimated 0.9 million cryptomining machines had been cut off from the internet during the nationwide internet blackout, causing the power consumption in the country to fall by 2.4 gigawatts (GW).
Tavanir said, however, that some machines had remained connected to the internet during the blackout by using the services of Starlink, a US provider of satellite internet, which is banned in Iran.
An Energy Ministry statement released in May said that more than a quarter of a million cryptomining machines had been seized as part of more than a year of government clampdown on excessive use of energy.
Authorities say that each cryptomining machine’s consumption of electricity is equivalent to the usage of 10 Iranian households.
Press TV