The Iranian regime’s $1B #Bitcoin mining empire is getting obliterated in real time.

Explosions rocking #Tehran, Isfahan, western provinces. US & Israel in “major combat operations”.

Grid infrastructure — the lifeblood of those ~700K rigs — is prime target. No direct hits needed on miners; cascading blackouts do the job.

Iran’s been mining #BTC at ~$1,320/coin on half-cent/kWh subsidized power, flipping it near $68K for 50x gross margins on electricity alone.

IRGC-run ops (95% illegal) suck 2,000 MW daily — city-scale demand — while civilians get rolling blackouts and hospitals go dark.

This wasn’t a side hustle. Bitcoin was Iran’s #1 sanctions-evasion machine: subsidized energy → unsanctionable hard cash, no SWIFT touch.

They control 2–5% of global #hashrate — 1 in ~25 blocks funding the same IRGC guarding nukes, missiles, borders.

As strikes hit power plants and transmission (already failing grid), mining halts cold. Rigs need constant power; brief outages kill ops.

Expect that 2–5% hashrate plunge overnight — difficulty lags, blocks slow, fees spike.

That $1B annual #crypto revenue stream? Dark. Gone. Just like the centrifuges they’re targeting.

Oil’s surging on Strait fears. Bitcoin? Sliding hard as markets wake up to the real black swan: Iran’s hash vanishing mid-conflict.

Crypto ignored the countdown. Now it’s live.

America’s favorite twins are struggling these days, as Bitcoin’s crash continues to hammer their decade-old crypto exchange, Gemini Space Station Inc.

With Bitcoin down by over 40 percent since its record highs in fall of 2025, Bloomberg reports that shares for Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss’ crypto marketplace have collapsed by more than 80 percent from their 2025 highs, wiping out over $3 billion in market value. The situation seems to be rattling the enterprise to its core, coming the same week that Gemini moved to kick its chief operating officer, financial officer, and legal officer to the curb.

Keep in mind, even though Bitcoin started to tumble late into 2025, the crypto market had a banner year as a whole. If the Winklevii couldn’t make hay while the sun was shining on the best crypto market ever seen following the election of industry super-ally Donald Trump, it tracks that they wouldn’t fare well when the wildly volatile digital currencies inevitably experience a period of bust.

All in all, the continual collapse of one of the longest-standing crypto exchanges is a major red flag for the “industry” writ large, and financial analysts aren’t pulling their punches.

“The biggest issue here is that Gemini’s management team placed a big bet on the crypto bull market run continuing through 2027 and instead crypto asset prices have cratered,” analysts at the investment bank Truist Securities wrote in a note Tuesday viewed by Bloomberg. “Their strategy needs to change.”

The two had previously taken Gemini public on the Nasdaq Index in September, dazzling investors right before things began to turn ugly for crypto in October.

As Truist analyst Matthew Coad told Bloomberg: “they made the wrong bet at the wrong time.”

Elmer FUD
Concern Grows That Bitcoin’s Value Could Be Entirely Destroyed
“If it’s not going to zero, it’s going to a million.”
https://futurism.com/future-society/concern-bitcoin-value-destroyed?fbclid=IwdGRjcAQFcvpjbGNrBAVyvmV4dG4DYWVtAjExAHNydGMGYXBwX2lkDDM1MDY4NTUzMTcyOAABHn515yUe07gSqCBUr0DtrzRN2uINelhNnSG-X4WygEeNEAHQEBFrb1px3QVO_aem_4IZ8JEKjUEj-gjm30wZs5w

Bitcoin is struggling to regain the momentum it had in 2025, the first year of Trump’s extremely crypto-friendly administration.

The token is still hovering around the $67,000 mark, a major loss compared to its October all-time high of just under twice that. It has experienced its worst-ever start to a year, dropping 24 percent in the first 50 days of the year.

That tooth-rattling downturn has certain critics predicting a total collapse, suggesting its value could eventually plunge to zero dollars — a controversial stance that’s sparked a fierce debate. Proponents argue the core fundamentals haven’t changed at all, and that Bitcoin’s demise was the result of major macroeconomic uncertainty, questionable Federal Reserve policy, and major selloffs triggered by fears over a growing AI bubble.

Critics, however, point to Bitcoin becoming untethered from the value of gold, an identity crisis undermining its long-touted role as a “digital gold” safe haven for investors.

It’s a conundrum that has spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt — or FUD, a popular term in crypto circles. As one viral post on X pointed out, Google Trends has shown a major uptick for the queries “Bitcoin going to zero” and “Is Bitcoin dead?”

Michael Saylor, the executive chairman of Strategy, the largest corporate holder of Bitcoin, it’s all uphill from here.

“We may be in the middle of a crypto winter, but spring is coming — and Bitcoin is winning,” he tweeted earlier this week.

“If it’s not going to zero, it’s going to a million,” he added in a separate post today.

Skeptics, however, are far more pessimistic about Bitcoin’s chances in the long run, saying the crypto has lost its way.

If critics are to be believed, Bitcoin’s losses are only getting started as more people start to question its role as an untethered, highly speculative, and volatile asset. But Bitcoin has recovered from major crashes many times before, and a recovery is still far from being out of the question.

Crypto is back in the gutter. Bitcoin is below $70,000, down roughly 50% from its October highs. And the pain is sharpest for a new class of public companies that spent 2025 reinventing themselves as crypto hoarders: the so-called digital asset treasuries, or DATs.

There were more than 200 of these firms, collectively sitting on roughly $150 billion in crypto, at the end of 2025, comprising an entire mini-industry modeled after Michael Saylor’s Strategy, the $44 billion (market cap) bitcoin-buying behemoth that transformed itself from a small forgettable software company into the corporate champion of adding bitcoin to your balance sheet.

But even before the latest leg down, many DATs were already trading at discounts to the market value of their crypto. Now that tokens are sliding again, these stocks are falling faster than the assets they hold, racking up paper losses and making it harder to follow the Saylor playbook of continuous crypto buying.

Read more: https://www.forbes.com/sites/ninabambysheva/2026/02/17/bitcoins-crash-is-putting-crypto-treasury-stocks-to-the-test/?utm_campaign=ForbesMainFB&utm_source=ForbesMainFacebook&utm_medium=social

The blockchain-based assets, which more often than not took the form of cartoon pictures of silly-looking avatars like “CryptoPunks” to “Pudgy Penguins,” were selling like hot cakes. Even big shot celebrities were lining up to secure NFTs belonging to once-popular collections, like Yuga Labs’ Bored Ape Yacht Club.

In the midst of the craze, pop sensation Justin Bieber shelled out a hefty $1.3 million for a Bored Ape, an enormous sum of money for the rights to an image of a particularly glum-looking ape that appears to be on the verge of tears for some unknown reason.

Unsurprisingly, the questionable splurge turned out to be a hilariously bad investment. As Benzinga reports, the ape is now worth a measly $12,000, meaning that it’s lost over 99 percent of its value over the last three and change years.

The controversial crypto market has been going through an “NFT winter” following a brutal and extended crash. Collectors have gotten a hefty reality check. Who could’ve seen that coming?

Despite waning demand, Yuga Labs isn’t ready to call it quits. Earlier this year, the company announced it was looking to open an IRL Bored Ape clubhouse in Miami, featuring NFT galleries, event spaces, and “exclusive content” only members can explore.

But whether it can ever reignite the enormous amount of enthusiasm the trend once drew remains unclear at best.

While Bieber remains the proud owner of Bored Ape Yacht Club #3001, others are looking to cut their losses.

Read the full article: https://www.wired.com/story/crypto-funded-human-trafficking-is-exploding/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=aud-dev&utm_brand=wired&utm_social-type=owned

Cryptocurrencies have long been lauded for being a borderless, decentralized way to transfer cash — and while they’ve emerged as a major speculative asset, fans have often struggled to point to a real-world use case for them.

But thanks to a broad lack of regulation and the ability to carry out transactions via anonymous accounts, crypto have become incredibly popular for a distinctly grim use: funding human trafficking operations, from trapping laborers in compounds and forcing them to work, to prostitution rings.

According to a new report by blockchain intelligence company Chainalysis, crypto flows to suspected human trafficking services grew a shocking 85 percent last year, an alarming trend that underlines how the digital tokens are facilitating an enormous and growing amount of illegal activity.

In other words, crypto may have finally found its killer app.

“The emergence of borderless, low-fee payments has created the opportunity for human trafficking to scale faster.”

Chainalysis found that the total transaction volume of suspect crypto accounts reached hundreds of millions of dollars.

“The dollar amounts significantly understate the human toll of these crimes, where the true cost is measured in lives impacted rather than money transferred,” the company noted.

Human trafficking operations make use of stablecoins like Tether, digital tokens that are often tied to a fiat currency, while the use of Bitcoin has waned, suggesting “these entities prioritize payment stability and ease of conversion over the risks that these assets might be frozen by centralized issuers,” according to Chainalysis. CSAM vendors are using a “privacy coin” called Monero to make transactions harder to trace.

“Unlike cash transactions, cryptocurrency’s inherent transparency creates unprecedented opportunities for law enforcement and compliance teams to detect, track, and disrupt trafficking operations,” the company wrote.