Iran Legalizes Importation of Crypto Mining Hardware

After the recent sanctions imposed by the U.S. on Iran’s oil industry, that will take effect in early November, the Middle Eastern country’s economy is to incapacitate largely. The new blockchain technology has given a new ideation of thinking to the country and it is aiming to counter the crisis using the new blockchain technology.

Iranian officials made a decision to recognize cryptocurrency mining as an economic activity and soon after this Tehran seems to prepare to officially put on the papers the import of hardware equipment used to mine the digital currency.

The cryptomining is an important step as it may help Iran to come out of the crisis, in the vision of the Iranian authorities. There are different ways for cryptomining, some algorithm can still run more or less ‘effectively’ on CPUs while other works better on GPUs and still others are the domain of ASICs.

The need for hardware that has the potential to quickly restart the calculation required is a must as each time the block is found the calculation restarts. In the early stage of cryptocurrencies downloading and compiling the wallet for the coin was effective. Then configuring the mining software to join the crypto network of your choice and dedicate your CPU/GPU/ASIC to the task of running calculations.

The Secretary of the Islamic Republic’s Supreme Council of Cyberspace, Abolhassan Firouzabadi stated, “Necessary coordination has been done with related entities to allow the flow of hardware needed to mine bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.” The officials are also considering to establish an online digital asset exchange.

The Group Executive Chairman of Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria (BBVA), Spain’s second-largest bank, Francisco Gonzalez, believes we need to be careful with the cryptocurrencies as they are perfect but are used for “bad purposes” today. He continued that the distributed ledger technology and blockchain are “big, big tool” but the insufficient understanding of it is hindering our right direction. He added “We are in the middle of an incredible digital revolution. And in fact, a new world order is in the making, both social and economic…Something must be done in order to spread the wealth of this revolution to everybody…There are some ripple effects which must be understood in the case of cryptocurrencies.”

Zimbabwe, which is also a economically hurt country, is trying to find a way back with the help of new technology. Zimbabwe’s newly appointed finance minister, Mthuli Ncube, is putting effort to convince the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (RBZ) to establish a “cryptocurrency unit.” He believes this might pull out the nation’s cash shortage situation.

Ncube said, “Zimbabwe should be investing in understanding innovations and often central banks are too slow in investing in these technologies. But there are other countries which are moving faster. If you look at the Swiss central bank, they are investing in and understanding bitcoin.” He believes Zimbabwe should also think the way Switzerland is optimistic about the cryptocurrency.

He further added “We have innovative youngsters, so the idea shouldn’t be to stop it and say don’t do this, but rather the regulators should invest in catching up with them and find ways to understand it. Then you regulate it because you now understand it.”