The Block: Iran announces power tariffs for crypto miners; offers bounty for exposing illegal operations

The Iranian government has reportedly finalized power tariffs for cryptocurrency miners and is offering a bounty for exposing illegal mining operations in the country.

Anyone who exposes cryptocurrency miners using subsidized electricity will be rewarded with up to 20% of the recovery of the damage caused to the national power grid, Mostafa Rajabi, a spokesman of Iran’s Energy Ministry, told local news agency IRIB News in an interview Wednesday.

Under Iran’s new regulations, mining cryptocurrencies off the national electricity grid are banned during peak hours of consumption in Iran, which span over 300 hours a year, Rajabi reportedly said.

Other times of the year, an average price for the export of electricity, a fixed sum of 9,650 rials ($0.08) for each kilowatt-hour (KWh), will be used as a baseline to calculate the price of the power consumed by cryptocurrency miners, Rajabi added.

He also said that the price would be half that figure in the eight cold months of the year, around $0.04 per KWh, while it would quadruple to $0.16 per KWh in the remaining four months of warm weather.

In July, there were reports that the Economic Commission of Iran has finalized power tariffs for cryptocurrency miners, based on similar tariffs used for electricity exports. Using subsidized energy has previously put pressure on Iran’s national grid, causing a 7% increase in energy consumption in the country. Iranian authorities recently seized around 1,000 bitcoin mining machines from two former factories, following an increase in electricity consumption.