Original | Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)
Author | Golem (@web3_golem)
Some news makes people's imaginations run wild the moment it breaks, like this piece from April 8th—Iran plans to impose a transit fee on oil tankers passing through the Strait of Hormuz during the two-week ceasefire period, charging $1 per barrel, payable in Bitcoin.
The crypto market reacted quickly. When Iran stated its readiness to accept Bitcoin for oil transit fees, the price of BTC briefly surged to $73,000, likely influenced by this news. Although Bitcoin's price has since retreated to around $70,000 today, for Bitcoin believers, the symbolic significance far outweighs the利好 of “gaining a few percentage points”—Satoshi Nakamoto's vision of Bitcoin as “electronic cash” has been triggered in an extreme scenario.
An Extreme Tool Finally Meets an Extreme Scenario
After Iran announced this news to the world, I imagined an utterly absurd yet profoundly real moment.
In the narrow, blue throat of the Persian Gulf, which chokes over 20% of the world's crude oil supply, a line of oil tankers queues up waiting to pass. Above them, helicopters equipped with machine guns hover and circle, while not far away, Iranian warships stand ready to blast any unruly vessels. At this very moment, the captain of a supertanker carrying 2 million barrels of crude oil stands on the deck, squinting into the salty sea breeze, staring intently at a screen. He cannot hear the waves of the Persian Gulf; instead, he anxiously awaits the confirmation of a massive Bitcoin transaction by the miners—a process that takes about 10 minutes. Only once these Bitcoins successfully reach the address of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps can his ship pass safely.
When the lifeblood of modern industrial civilization—oil—requires “clearance” from both the physical strait and the digital Bitcoin network simultaneously, a certain dislocated sense of epic grandeur is enough to give one a cerebral climax.
Over the years, one of the most debated topics has been: what is Bitcoin actually good for? Regardless of the debate's outcome, the oldest narrative, the one first presented in the Bitcoin whitepaper—“peer-to-peer electronic cash”—has been denied. Bitcoin is not only highly volatile but also exceptionally slow in settlement. It's not just miles behind traditional banking settlement systems; even when the market considers the cost and efficiency of cross-border payments, stablecoins are the first choice. Bitcoin seemed to be completely written off for payment use cases.
But in extreme scenarios, traditional banking systems and stablecoins are useless. What is an extreme scenario? It's when a country is kicked out of SWIFT, its foreign exchange reserves in overseas banks become numbers it can see but not touch, and even using stablecoins risks being frozen by the issuer. Iran is currently facing such an extreme scenario. Even if bank and stablecoin settlements are faster, the funds ultimately cannot reach Iran's pockets. (Odaily Note: Tether froze 42 Iranian addresses in 2025; in March 2026, Circle and Tether协同 froze approximately $2.49 million in stablecoin assets related to the Iranian exchange Wallex.)
If you were Iran, facing a “global police” that can freeze all your foreign assets and cut off all your banking links at any moment, efficiency and volatility no longer matter; autonomous settlement power is everything Hamid Hosseini, spokesman for the Union of Iranian Oil, Gas and Petrochemical Products Exporters, was blunt when explaining the reason for choosing Bitcoin as a settlement tool to a Financial Times reporter: using Bitcoin is to ensure it cannot be tracked or confiscated due to sanctions.
Hosseini is only half right. Bitcoin transactions can also be tracked on the blockchain, and the US has indeed tracked and confiscated Bitcoin in numerous international cases in the past. But these actions are retrospective and take time. Furthermore, due to the decentralized nature of the Bitcoin network, at the very least, the US government cannot track and阻止 the transaction between Iran and the tanker *at the moment it happens*. For Iran, achieving this is enough.
This also proves that perhaps Bitcoin was never meant for “peaceful and prosperous times”. When the world begins to fragment and credit collapses, this consensus system based on mathematics and code becomes the last “financial preserve” for marginalized groups. The “dragon-slaying technique” written by Satoshi Nakamoto over a decade ago has found its use in the smoke of the Persian Gulf.
Collecting Bitcoin in the Gulf: Just Hot Air?
But don't rush to pop the champagne for Bitcoin yet. Let's return to reality. This “option” of collecting Bitcoin for Gulf transit might not actually happen. On the morning of April 9th, the day after Hosseini announced the Bitcoin levy for transit tankers, the Strait of Hormuz was closed again. This makes one wonder: was Hosseini just talking big from the start?
Arthur Hayes expressed similar doubts, posting on platform X that he would only believe Iran's claim of collecting transit fees in Bitcoin upon seeing actual Bitcoin transaction records on the blockchain. Otherwise, it's more likely a form of mockery aimed at the Western financial system.
Even taking a huge step back, if the Strait of Hormuz weren't closed today and the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps collected a heap of Bitcoin, they wouldn't just sit on it. To buy food, medicine, and weapons, Iran would eventually need to sell these Bitcoins for fiat currency. But under the current OFAC sanctions against Iran, which global exchange, which institution would dare help Iran sell these Bitcoins? The US might not catch you immediately, but reckoning could come later.
So, considering reality, Hosseini's statement is most likely a psychological tactic, not necessarily a genuine intent to collect Bitcoin, but rather a strong message to the US. The signal Iran wants to send is one of the ineffectiveness of US sanctions: in extreme scenarios, without relying on dollar settlements, SWIFT, or stablecoins, I can still maneuver freely within the international financial system.
Ultimately, often in geopolitics, what matters in a statement is not whether it can be implemented, but what signal it sends to the opponent, what psychological pressure it creates, and what博弈 expectations it alters. Even if the thing doesn't materialize in the end, it has already completed its mission of dissemination. For instance, on the eve of the US-Iran two-week ceasefire announcement, Trump talked big about wiping Iranian civilization out in one night. Without such a powerful threat from Trump, it's hard to say if the US and Iran would have reached a ceasefire.
So, in this博弈, Bitcoin can play the role of an assassin, or it can just be a smokescreen. As crypto advocates, we shouldn't be too disappointed. The right attitude is neither to over-imagine nor to overly dismiss.
Because one thing is certain: Bitcoin has been forcibly dragged into the “geopolitical arena.” When Bitcoin is wielded as a weapon and a threat by a sovereign state, it proves it hasn't been forgotten.
This is enough to comfort the heart. The world is growing colder; Bitcoin's miners are running hot.
