Originally published in Farsi as «آیا بیت کوین ایران را تحریم کرد؟!» on بلاک فارسی (BlockFarsi) — the blockchain news & education outlet I ran — on November 10, 2018; translated to English for this site. Original text recovered via the Wayback Machine.

"Bitcoin sanctioned Iran"! Anyone with even a passing familiarity with blockchain & cryptocurrency concepts will laugh at that sentence — because it is nonsense at its core!

As BlockFarsi reports: Bitcoin is not a state-owned or private company that can be pressured — via a government or a board of directors — into imposing sanctions against a country such as Iran. Bitcoin is an entity/network that is decentralized in both operation & governance, which means control over it is distributed across the general public of the world. So it should not be reasoned about — or have its fate judged — the way companies or governments are.

So what is this flood of "Bitcoin sanctions Iran" news?!

Part of the recent news wave traces back to events of early Mordad this year (1397 / late July 2018), when — per the website Bitcoinist — the US federal government seized 500 bitcoins belonging to Iranians. Those bitcoins were worth roughly 25 billion rials (about 2.5 billion tomans) at the time of purchase. But some sites & channels — chasing traffic, or with motives unknown to this author — have been recirculating this stale, dated news, worrying a wide spectrum of actors in the blockchain & crypto space.

The other driver of similar "digital currencies sanction Iran" / "Bitcoin drops support for Iran" stories is the recent actions of some international crypto exchanges. Per statements by Sepehr Mohammadi, head of the Iran Blockchain Association, Binance and Bittrex are among the exchanges that have recently — unofficially — stopped serving Iran. Those decisions came after the new round of unjust US sanctions against our country took effect on Aban 14 (November 5).

But all of this news, even assuming complete accuracy, in no way amounts to Bitcoin sanctioning Iran. An example makes it clearer: international banks sanctioning Iran doesn't mean the dollar sanctioned Iran — if it did, the price of the dollar inside the country would have collapsed to zero rials. The same holds for Bitcoin. A number of international exchanges halting trading for users residing in Iran (on Iranian IPs) says nothing about Bitcoin being worthless, and its holders can easily keep buying, selling & exchanging it against digital and traditional currencies among themselves.

So BlockFarsi offers this reassurance to all compatriots active in & enthusiastic about blockchain and digital currencies — Bitcoin above all: they can carry on engaging with digital currencies (chiefly Bitcoin & Ethereum) in accordance with the country's official laws, and shouldn't let such rumors dent their focus on their work.