Is there a chance that the US -wanted- the strait closed so they could look like they got it to reopen, now with fees, which ultimately funnel back to the US?
It would be a way to exploit the natural resources of the Middle East without needing to invade.
“ ABC News’s Jonathan Karl asked Trump if he approved of Iran’s plan to charge vessels a fee for passing through the strait — a key channel through which roughly 20 percent of the world’s oil is transported. “We’re thinking of doing it as a joint venture,” the president told Karl, who shared Trump’s response on social platform X. “It’s a way of securing it — also securing it from lots of other people. It’s a beautiful thing.””
I bet Trump will justify it as compensation for US “security” guarantees to Gulf States.
It is interesting in several different ways, because I was speculating on how it is being done before current cease fire. Everything seemed to be point to Yuan ( or other non-USD currencies ), which then are more easily settled by vessel owners and likely buried under some non-descript names like fees to be , maybe, questioned later its all done.
edit: And it seems I was wrong despite it being my initial thought in terms of used rail.
Does this mean ceasefire is now broken? The 10 point plan was to be discussed later in the peace talks, but what was the exact conditions that predicated the ceasefire?
Definitively if they agreed to it as part of the ceasefire. What did each part actually agree to when they agreed to a ceasefire? There doesn't seem to be much concrete information about that part.
As best I can tell, the Iranian regime and Sharif both said that they ceasefire included a cease to strikes on Lebanon, Netanyahu explicitly said that it did not, and the Trump admin, Lebanon, and Hezbollah have not yet commented either way.
”Hosseini said that each tanker must email authorities about its cargo, after which Iran will inform them of the toll to be paid in digital currencies.
“He said that the tariff is $1 per barrel of oil, adding that empty tankers can pass freely.
“‘Once the email arrives and Iran completes its assessment, vessels are given a few seconds to pay in bitcoin, ensuring they can’t be traced or confiscated due to sanctions,’ Hosseini added.”
As bitcoin is quite traceable I don't see how this works if you're trying to avoid sanctions. For Iran it probably doesn't matter but for the vessel owners it probably does.
Business idea - Iran Bitcoin fee intermediary. Realistically the CIA will handle this for US companies and maybe allies until they figure something out.
So apart from all the geopolitics of it this line is interesting
"few seconds to pay in bitcoin, ensuring they can’t be traced or confiscated due to sanctions,’ Hosseini added"
Maybe I'm ignorant of Bitcoin but isn't Bitcoin transactions recorded in a public cryptographically signed ledger? Isn't that literally the opposite of "can't be traced"?
Or, if you knew the bitcoin addresses, you could figure out exactly how much oil is being moved. I would think oil data analysts would love to have access to that data (if they don't already).
What is to stop the ships from lying ? I wonder if Iran will do spot check of some ships to prevent this. And will boarding ships cause Trump to have yet another breakdown ?
Lying about their cargo? Can’t lie about the weight … Probably the savings from lying about the nature of the cargo is not worth the risk of exploding..
I did a double-take at it being Bitcoin fees, since you'd think they'd want some stablecoin (even if not USD) so as to avoid inheriting the volatility, but no, they want Bitcoin specifically:
>“Once the email arrives and Iran completes its assessment, vessels are given a few seconds to pay in Bitcoin, ensuring they can’t be traced or confiscated due to sanctions,” FT reported, citing Hosseini.
I think this war will be the moment that historians mark as the death of Pax Americana. The US failed to change the Iranian regime, failed to open the strait, and now a previously international waterway will be tolled in a currency other than the dollar.
I’d say there is a credible case for saying the vote for 2nd round of trump was the turning point. By that point is was already pretty well established that he isn’t fit yet that’s what the public wanted.
TBF, Iran is saying an exorbitant price right now, but in reality they will need to balance their price with demand to bring in the maximum possible revenue. The toll may work out in the long run.
The problem is the fee has nothing material to do with the straight itself. There are no maintenance costs for the open sea. Coordination is also not a big concern, you can tell because previously ships were able to pass without incident and coordinate among themselves.
Actually, this is extortion. Meaning that it is done under threat of violence. Worse yet, the US military may end up enforcing this, and collecting on a share of the fees.
It won't take very long for Iran to recoup the damages. After that, why keep the fees going? Because it's free money, that's why.
The strange this is, if the US and Iran can partner on this, that would lead to a weird peace, because they both stand to benefit, meanwhile countries that depend on the straight (Korea, Japan, etc.) have to pay the bill.
> There are no maintenance costs for the open sea.
There are massive maintenance costs for the open sea with how we utilize it. Maritime security and policing, navigational infrastructure, weather reporting, radio repeaters, international bureaucracy, etc.
Global maritime trade is extremely costly. It's simply hidden behind opaque public spending on things you don't think about. In all likelihood it's a sunk cost that would ballpark around a few hundred billion dollars annually, invisible money spent just to keep things running at the scale and reliability that they do.
Now the maritime traffic passing through the Strait of Hormuz may only partially overlap with this spending, but people greatly overestimate just how "cheap" maritime activity actually is.
I don't think this count as open sea. The rule is 12 miles from the coast (12 nautical miles btw, i don't know what it is in freedom units). i'm pretty sure the strait is narrower than that at the place where the toll is paid (if you count both side, i.e less than 24 miles Between Oman's peninsula i forgot the name of, and Hormuz/Qeshm islands).
So basically, Iran say "here, you have to pass through our or Oman's waters, we will let you, but please pay a toll for the derangement, that we will share with Oman."
not really; you would have to pay to run an oil pipeline through another country's territory even if that country wasn't bearing the cost of maintaining the oil pipeline
the strait isn't international waters -- it's part of Iran and Oman's territorial waters
Very Large Crude Carriers carry ~2 million barrels of oil. Ultra Large Crude Carriers double that. If oil went down to $50/Bbl, that $2 million fee amounts to a ~2% tax per ship, given their cargo capacity. It's not particularly exorbitant, especially given that the entire reason they proposed this toll was to fund their rebuilding efforts (Americans and Israelis did a lot of damage that's been under-reported and ignored)
This conflict has been an interesting case of watching mass hysteria interact with propaganda in the newform, rapid pace of media that exists in the internet age. The amount of wild conjecture, speculation, misinformation is the most extreme I've ever seen it, eclipsing even the 6 months of nonsense that was spurred on by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
I think the price can only increase. There is not much competition for Hormuz. If it is exorbitant now, it can only be more expensive later on. The demand for oil is not going to go down drastically for quite a few years.
If there was another route, the oil would have found the way.
Pipelines are incredibly vulnerable to being taken offline by an inexpensive long-range strike. You can't just put them in the middle of a war zone, especially when we (the US) have targeted that same type of infrastructure first.
sure, as the oil wells and the pumping stations and everything not underground, but right now there's not even an option to try. (also loss of a pipe section compared to the loss of a tanker is much better economically, easy to replace, not to mention that there's no loss of life, so ultimately it can bear more risk even if there's an active conflict.)
In time pipelines can be made, no? 2 million per ship already gives a lot of room for exorbitant infrastructure projects to break even in the medium term
Pipelines take years, even decades, at least here in Canada. You'd be surprised at how many billions of dollars and person-years of labour you need to get the thing turned on.
I can't believe that the toll will actually be paid - it would turn Iran into an INSANELY wealthy superpower and easily give them the funds to hugely increase their availability to fund groups like hezbollah etc.
I think it’s weird that you imply that it is because the American regime failed to change the Iranian regime. They (lead by Israel or not) illegally invaded a country.
It’s just Pax for those parts of the world that America and its allies are not invading (and other non-allied examples like Russia invading Ukraine).
But a typical top-comment about how America Did a Bad Thing Which Ruined The Good American-lead Times.
No air war has changed a regime. The US government knows this. Trump knows this and never had regime change as an objective. Why are you saying that regime change was an objective, and how do you think it was going to happen in an air war when no air war has caused a regime change before?
Little correction: Trump has a different objective every second day, and at some point there was (also) regime change on the menu. Might come again, I don't know.
Trump was talking about the protests there and that the US would help them. And we kept killing Iranian leadership lol.
Why are you taking what the Trump admin says at face value, anyways? Are you still a fool after all these years? This is like "fool me a 10,000th time" by now haaha
What he says matches to reality: that regime change isn't possible with an air war. Thus even if you don't listen to him, we know from prior experience that regime change is highly improbable. Every person educated about these things knows that.
I am afraid that soon, actual sea pirates, e.g. in Central and South America, Africa, etc. will start using naval mines in their regional seas, demanding crypto payment from passing ships.
The person launching them sure does. This scenario reminds me of the time Russian hackers took over a US pipeline a couple years ago then immediately apologized saying they didn't want to cause a international incident and they would vet their targets better in the future. There are not many people who want that kind of heat. Like the first ayatollah is dead and the second is reportedly in a coma. The Iranian government is willing to pay that price and that's why they won. How many pirate leaders do you think are willing to pay their life so that their third of fourth successors can maybe collect a toll? Or how many are like Venezuela and you can kidnap one guy and the whole house folds.
Cryptocurrency has had many legal real world uses cases. It is used heavily in prediction markets. Serving as an inflation-resistant store of value that is orthogonal to gold also is an implicit real world use case. Permissionless and easy international transfer of funds between individuals has been the biggest real world use. It's not only for collecting and trading. Obviously, those wanting to suppress it will keep finding excuses.
The same people have no idea what's coming for them even when it's in their face as with the posted news article. If the US doesn't act now to restore the use of USD in Hormuz, it's the beginning of the end of the for the USD as a currency for international trade.
I personally think is the US's Teutoburg Forest moment [1]. Rome was capable of rebuilding legions. After all, they'd done so historically (eg after the Battle of Cannae [2]) but Teutoburg really exposed the rot and dysfunction within the Rome. I personally believe this event will be a turning point in redefining the relationships with Europe, the Gulf states and Israel.
Details on this deal are sketchy but it seems like Iran will continue charging a toll for the Strait of Hormuz (of approximately $1/barrel). You hear figures like $2 million but bear in mind that VLCCs/ULCCs can carry 2M+ barrels of oil. Also, it seems like there will be significant sanctions relief.
Here's the problem: how does Iran get paid? Normally that would be through international payments systems but the US exerts a lot of control over those and can freeze assets as they've done in the past. Part of the payments under the previous JCPOA [3] were to return money paid to Iran for oil where those payments had been frozen. Russia got locked out of SWIFT after the Ukraine invasion [4] as another example.
So I see this as a defensive and potentially temporary move to avoid the risk of asset seizure and freezing should hostilities resume. Iran may well end up with access to international payments systems again in the coming weeks, at which point this could all change.
It is interesting that crypto is being used for this but that just goes to the point that the use case for crypto is to bypass laws. That's no different here.
Something is very fishy about all of this.
Is there a chance that the US -wanted- the strait closed so they could look like they got it to reopen, now with fees, which ultimately funnel back to the US?
It would be a way to exploit the natural resources of the Middle East without needing to invade.
Why would Iran give the US fees?
Behind the scenes, they may have already conceded to paying Trump off just like the other gulf states.
“ ABC News’s Jonathan Karl asked Trump if he approved of Iran’s plan to charge vessels a fee for passing through the strait — a key channel through which roughly 20 percent of the world’s oil is transported. “We’re thinking of doing it as a joint venture,” the president told Karl, who shared Trump’s response on social platform X. “It’s a way of securing it — also securing it from lots of other people. It’s a beautiful thing.””
I bet Trump will justify it as compensation for US “security” guarantees to Gulf States.
https://thehill.com/policy/international/5821343-trump-us-ir...
Is this Breitbart comments what's going on here?
It is interesting in several different ways, because I was speculating on how it is being done before current cease fire. Everything seemed to be point to Yuan ( or other non-USD currencies ), which then are more easily settled by vessel owners and likely buried under some non-descript names like fees to be , maybe, questioned later its all done.
edit: And it seems I was wrong despite it being my initial thought in terms of used rail.
The FT trying to push markets and capital again? If they do everyone can just track their bitcoin transactions..
Does this mean ceasefire is now broken? The 10 point plan was to be discussed later in the peace talks, but what was the exact conditions that predicated the ceasefire?
Isn't it broken with Israel continuing their war against Lebanon?
Definitively if they agreed to it as part of the ceasefire. What did each part actually agree to when they agreed to a ceasefire? There doesn't seem to be much concrete information about that part.
As best I can tell, the Iranian regime and Sharif both said that they ceasefire included a cease to strikes on Lebanon, Netanyahu explicitly said that it did not, and the Trump admin, Lebanon, and Hezbollah have not yet commented either way.
Links to Pakistan and Israel statements here: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/4/8/us-iran-ceasefire-de...
Trump and Leavitt have both said that Lebanon is not part of the ceasefire
No - the Iranian's didn't say they were letting ships through for free
I was under the impression that they were asking for payment in stablecoins, not bitcoin? Did they change their mind?
Given that 99% of stablecoins are USD-denominated, and that the vast, vast majority of those are custodial, Bitcoin makes much more sense for Iran.
I’ve heard a lot of discussion about them accepting payments in Chinese yuan. I wonder if there’s a stablecoin pegged to it.
That would be very risky for Iran because the top stablecoins could be freezed. They are centralized.
”Hosseini said that each tanker must email authorities about its cargo, after which Iran will inform them of the toll to be paid in digital currencies.
“He said that the tariff is $1 per barrel of oil, adding that empty tankers can pass freely.
“‘Once the email arrives and Iran completes its assessment, vessels are given a few seconds to pay in bitcoin, ensuring they can’t be traced or confiscated due to sanctions,’ Hosseini added.”
As bitcoin is quite traceable I don't see how this works if you're trying to avoid sanctions. For Iran it probably doesn't matter but for the vessel owners it probably does.
Yes, from sanctions perspective, the vessel owners seem to have more exposure than Iran -- as crazy as it sounds on the surface.
Business idea - Iran Bitcoin fee intermediary. Realistically the CIA will handle this for US companies and maybe allies until they figure something out.
Agreed, but I wonder it if matters in practice. It's not like one can boycott bitcoins by serial number or something, is it?
Kind of: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/7966/what-are-ta...
the issue is the US' ability to freeze USD bank accounts on its soil or pressuring other banks to do the same
So apart from all the geopolitics of it this line is interesting
"few seconds to pay in bitcoin, ensuring they can’t be traced or confiscated due to sanctions,’ Hosseini added"
Maybe I'm ignorant of Bitcoin but isn't Bitcoin transactions recorded in a public cryptographically signed ledger? Isn't that literally the opposite of "can't be traced"?
And if you knew the manifests (quantity of oil) for the ship, just the value of the bitcount transaction could be used for tracking.
Or, if you knew the bitcoin addresses, you could figure out exactly how much oil is being moved. I would think oil data analysts would love to have access to that data (if they don't already).
Cannot get to the article, so:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/iran-warns-tankers-they...
What is to stop the ships from lying ? I wonder if Iran will do spot check of some ships to prevent this. And will boarding ships cause Trump to have yet another breakdown ?
Because ship displacement is really hard to disguise? It's probably like trying to sneak your friend in to the movies under your overcoat.
Lying about their cargo? Can’t lie about the weight … Probably the savings from lying about the nature of the cargo is not worth the risk of exploding..
I did a double-take at it being Bitcoin fees, since you'd think they'd want some stablecoin (even if not USD) so as to avoid inheriting the volatility, but no, they want Bitcoin specifically:
>“Once the email arrives and Iran completes its assessment, vessels are given a few seconds to pay in Bitcoin, ensuring they can’t be traced or confiscated due to sanctions,” FT reported, citing Hosseini.
https://beincrypto.com/iran-bitcoin-toll-hormuz-strait-tanke...
I think this war will be the moment that historians mark as the death of Pax Americana. The US failed to change the Iranian regime, failed to open the strait, and now a previously international waterway will be tolled in a currency other than the dollar.
I wish it need not have happened in my time
This war will be to the US what the Suez Crisis was to the United Kingdom.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suez_Crisis
TIL about one more time Israel was invading it's neighbors..
I’d say there is a credible case for saying the vote for 2nd round of trump was the turning point. By that point is was already pretty well established that he isn’t fit yet that’s what the public wanted.
TBF, Iran is saying an exorbitant price right now, but in reality they will need to balance their price with demand to bring in the maximum possible revenue. The toll may work out in the long run.
The problem is the fee has nothing material to do with the straight itself. There are no maintenance costs for the open sea. Coordination is also not a big concern, you can tell because previously ships were able to pass without incident and coordinate among themselves.
Actually, this is extortion. Meaning that it is done under threat of violence. Worse yet, the US military may end up enforcing this, and collecting on a share of the fees.
It won't take very long for Iran to recoup the damages. After that, why keep the fees going? Because it's free money, that's why.
The strange this is, if the US and Iran can partner on this, that would lead to a weird peace, because they both stand to benefit, meanwhile countries that depend on the straight (Korea, Japan, etc.) have to pay the bill.
> There are no maintenance costs for the open sea.
There are massive maintenance costs for the open sea with how we utilize it. Maritime security and policing, navigational infrastructure, weather reporting, radio repeaters, international bureaucracy, etc.
Global maritime trade is extremely costly. It's simply hidden behind opaque public spending on things you don't think about. In all likelihood it's a sunk cost that would ballpark around a few hundred billion dollars annually, invisible money spent just to keep things running at the scale and reliability that they do.
Now the maritime traffic passing through the Strait of Hormuz may only partially overlap with this spending, but people greatly overestimate just how "cheap" maritime activity actually is.
I don't think this count as open sea. The rule is 12 miles from the coast (12 nautical miles btw, i don't know what it is in freedom units). i'm pretty sure the strait is narrower than that at the place where the toll is paid (if you count both side, i.e less than 24 miles Between Oman's peninsula i forgot the name of, and Hormuz/Qeshm islands).
So basically, Iran say "here, you have to pass through our or Oman's waters, we will let you, but please pay a toll for the derangement, that we will share with Oman."
> extortion
not really; you would have to pay to run an oil pipeline through another country's territory even if that country wasn't bearing the cost of maintaining the oil pipeline
the strait isn't international waters -- it's part of Iran and Oman's territorial waters
Very Large Crude Carriers carry ~2 million barrels of oil. Ultra Large Crude Carriers double that. If oil went down to $50/Bbl, that $2 million fee amounts to a ~2% tax per ship, given their cargo capacity. It's not particularly exorbitant, especially given that the entire reason they proposed this toll was to fund their rebuilding efforts (Americans and Israelis did a lot of damage that's been under-reported and ignored)
This conflict has been an interesting case of watching mass hysteria interact with propaganda in the newform, rapid pace of media that exists in the internet age. The amount of wild conjecture, speculation, misinformation is the most extreme I've ever seen it, eclipsing even the 6 months of nonsense that was spurred on by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
I think the price can only increase. There is not much competition for Hormuz. If it is exorbitant now, it can only be more expensive later on. The demand for oil is not going to go down drastically for quite a few years.
If there was another route, the oil would have found the way.
pipelines, railway, etc.
had the US had any real plan to empower the Gulf states against Iran there would already be backup routes
Pipelines are incredibly vulnerable to being taken offline by an inexpensive long-range strike. You can't just put them in the middle of a war zone, especially when we (the US) have targeted that same type of infrastructure first.
sure, as the oil wells and the pumping stations and everything not underground, but right now there's not even an option to try. (also loss of a pipe section compared to the loss of a tanker is much better economically, easy to replace, not to mention that there's no loss of life, so ultimately it can bear more risk even if there's an active conflict.)
In time pipelines can be made, no? 2 million per ship already gives a lot of room for exorbitant infrastructure projects to break even in the medium term
Pipelines take years, even decades, at least here in Canada. You'd be surprised at how many billions of dollars and person-years of labour you need to get the thing turned on.
Five years at 2mil per ship will make Iran rich.
I can't believe that the toll will actually be paid - it would turn Iran into an INSANELY wealthy superpower and easily give them the funds to hugely increase their availability to fund groups like hezbollah etc.
Trump promised the most crypto-friendly US administration ever, but this is probably not what Republicans had in mind.
I think it’s weird that you imply that it is because the American regime failed to change the Iranian regime. They (lead by Israel or not) illegally invaded a country.
It’s just Pax for those parts of the world that America and its allies are not invading (and other non-allied examples like Russia invading Ukraine).
But a typical top-comment about how America Did a Bad Thing Which Ruined The Good American-lead Times.
> It’s just Pax for those parts of the world that America and its allies are not invading
Aren't you making the very point you purport to refute? What's so different about this than Rome circa 50 BC? They even invaded Persia!
No air war has changed a regime. The US government knows this. Trump knows this and never had regime change as an objective. Why are you saying that regime change was an objective, and how do you think it was going to happen in an air war when no air war has caused a regime change before?
Little correction: Trump has a different objective every second day, and at some point there was (also) regime change on the menu. Might come again, I don't know.
Trump was talking about the protests there and that the US would help them. And we kept killing Iranian leadership lol.
Why are you taking what the Trump admin says at face value, anyways? Are you still a fool after all these years? This is like "fool me a 10,000th time" by now haaha
What he says matches to reality: that regime change isn't possible with an air war. Thus even if you don't listen to him, we know from prior experience that regime change is highly improbable. Every person educated about these things knows that.
Unpaywalled alt links:
https://beincrypto.com/iran-bitcoin-toll-hormuz-strait-tanke...
https://news.bitcoin.com/report-iran-charges-crypto-and-yuan...
https://www.zerohedge.com/energy/first-two-ships-pass-throug...
Finally, the Real World use case for Bitcoin!
Ransomware payments, speculative trading, now paying off oil pirates!
Iran is a recognized national government, not a pirate.
Oh crud I just opened a can of worms with that, didn't I?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirates_and_Emperors
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQBWGo7pef8
I am afraid that soon, actual sea pirates, e.g. in Central and South America, Africa, etc. will start using naval mines in their regional seas, demanding crypto payment from passing ships.
I'm not sure most people have the strength of conviction in their God to stare down the us navy like Iran does.
Do drones need conviction?
The person launching them sure does. This scenario reminds me of the time Russian hackers took over a US pipeline a couple years ago then immediately apologized saying they didn't want to cause a international incident and they would vet their targets better in the future. There are not many people who want that kind of heat. Like the first ayatollah is dead and the second is reportedly in a coma. The Iranian government is willing to pay that price and that's why they won. How many pirate leaders do you think are willing to pay their life so that their third of fourth successors can maybe collect a toll? Or how many are like Venezuela and you can kidnap one guy and the whole house folds.
It doesn't have to be a US Navy ship that they target. They could target anyone else. The mines are intelligent in who they target.
If they're dropping mines then the navy will be the targets eventually.
Things that have never happened with USD. Glad we have a truly clean pure money that is incorruptible unlike bitcoin.
Cryptocurrency has had many legal real world uses cases. It is used heavily in prediction markets. Serving as an inflation-resistant store of value that is orthogonal to gold also is an implicit real world use case. Permissionless and easy international transfer of funds between individuals has been the biggest real world use. It's not only for collecting and trading. Obviously, those wanting to suppress it will keep finding excuses.
Defending crypto as legitimate by adding 'it's also useful for gambling to get around regulation' is wild.
I confess I'm not entirely sure if this is satire or if you are a true believer. Well done!
Lol at the downvotes. People get so mad if you say you prefer one imaginary ledger over another.
The same people have no idea what's coming for them even when it's in their face as with the posted news article. If the US doesn't act now to restore the use of USD in Hormuz, it's the beginning of the end of the for the USD as a currency for international trade.
Should just pay in pure cocaine, cut out the crypto middlemen.
I personally think is the US's Teutoburg Forest moment [1]. Rome was capable of rebuilding legions. After all, they'd done so historically (eg after the Battle of Cannae [2]) but Teutoburg really exposed the rot and dysfunction within the Rome. I personally believe this event will be a turning point in redefining the relationships with Europe, the Gulf states and Israel.
Details on this deal are sketchy but it seems like Iran will continue charging a toll for the Strait of Hormuz (of approximately $1/barrel). You hear figures like $2 million but bear in mind that VLCCs/ULCCs can carry 2M+ barrels of oil. Also, it seems like there will be significant sanctions relief.
Here's the problem: how does Iran get paid? Normally that would be through international payments systems but the US exerts a lot of control over those and can freeze assets as they've done in the past. Part of the payments under the previous JCPOA [3] were to return money paid to Iran for oil where those payments had been frozen. Russia got locked out of SWIFT after the Ukraine invasion [4] as another example.
So I see this as a defensive and potentially temporary move to avoid the risk of asset seizure and freezing should hostilities resume. Iran may well end up with access to international payments systems again in the coming weeks, at which point this could all change.
It is interesting that crypto is being used for this but that just goes to the point that the use case for crypto is to bypass laws. That's no different here.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Teutoburg_Forest
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cannae
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_nuclear_deal
[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWIFT_ban_against_Russian_bank...
The point of crypto is to cut out the middleman, to bypass authoritarianism, to bypass censorship, to not have to trust anybody.
The US being able to just cut off people from the financial system is seen as very problematic by anyone outside the US.
Pretty crazy for countries to demand Bitcoin that has no clear plans for quantum. Not to mention security budget issues.
It’s not like Iran plans to keep the Bitcoin. It’s just a way around sanctions.
Weren’t sanctions lifted last week?
No
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/08/trump-threatens-tariffs-coun...
on just oil afaik.