https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/23/technology/binance-employ...
> People in Iran had gained access to more than 1,500 accounts on the Binance platform over the previous year. About $1.7 billion had flowed from two Binance accounts to Iranian entities with links to terrorist groups, a possible violation of global sanctions. And one of those accounts belonged to a Binance vendor.
> After uncovering the transactions, the investigators reported them to top executives, according to company records and other documents reviewed by The New York Times.
> Within weeks, Binance fired or suspended at least four employees involved in the investigation, according to the documents and three people with knowledge of the situation. The company cited issues such as “violations of company protocol” related to the handling of client data.
[..]
> But internal warnings about the Iranian transactions surfaced last year, in the months before President Trump granted a pardon to Binance’s founder, Changpeng Zhao, who had spent four months in federal prison in 2024 for his role in the firm’s crimes. The Trump family’s crypto start-up, World Liberty Financial, has forged close business ties with Binance, and Mr. Zhao was a guest this month at a conference at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s club in Palm Beach, Fla.
This all sounds more like a TV show script than an actual thought-out plan to me.
no, mate
Lightning is just an off-chain out-branch, which will eventually be re-integrated onto the main blockchain (based on its original funding/terms). The benefit of this is that single entities can branch off the main blockchain, which is limited in its total blocksize/capacity.
The only limits are those by the handling lightning institution. This differs from bitcoin's main public blockchain, which rewards/creates approximately six blocks /hour, each with a limit of just a couple megabytes.
edit: And it seems I was wrong despite it being my initial thought in terms of used rail.
Links to Pakistan and Israel statements here: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/4/8/us-iran-ceasefire-de...
Even if USA insist on Israel-Hezbollah (and so Lebanon) be kept apart from any deal to end their war in Iran, it would still mean a terrible strategic and diplomatic disaster between USA and Israel, because Israel Gov' will be left with two terrible scenarios:
1) Trump Admin' will concede to Iran they'd be leaving the region and leaving Israel to defend itself alone, because the Hormuz being open for business and the Gulf states being spared would be enough; or
2) USA will have to resume hostilities, meaning domestically Trump will have to explain the US Military is obliged to continue the war effort for as long as Israel want.
IMHO don't see how Israel-US can politically survive those two scenarios.
Is that such a bad thing?
Also, I really wouldn't suggest using aljazeera.
It is not "the other side of the coin". Qatar is very much on the US side, and opposite to Iran.
Their reporting is fine, and I typically find it more informative than the US news sources. But let's not pretend you are getting the Iranian side of the deal here.
Particularly, my favorite news sources for the war is, oddly enough, FT
https://factually.co/fact-checks/media/should-i-trust-al-jaz...
https://www.axios.com/2026/04/08/lebanon-attacks-israel-iran...
I mean, I wouldn't expect a random diplomat to read iranian... but would 99.999999999% expect to read english
those iranian side who didn't point out "hey english version is different!" are all bonkers
2. Iranians can't read.
Which do you think is more likely?
Are they any more accurate than what Iran or America thinks? IIUC, this whole thing is phone tag.
and yes because Iran does include it in their terms it.means US now gets to fight Israel.with diplomacy :') again.
Asked on 7.30 if the ceasefire should apply to Israel's action in Lebanon, [Australian Foreign Minister] Senator Wong was adamant it should. "Yes," she said. "Our position is that the world expects that the ceasefire should apply to the region."
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-04-08/penny-wong-says-israe...
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/what-us-iran-isra...
>Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif announced the ceasefire between Iran and the United States on X, saying the two sides agreed to an immediate ceasefire everywhere, including Lebanon, where Israel launched strikes.
This suggests that either the Americans are lying or they did not read the agreement carefully before signing. Either way I don't think it's a good look for the United States.
The US has plenty of ability to force Israel to stop its invasion of Lebanon and it has done similar things twice before by economic means. All parties to the agreement are aware of this.
Wouldn't be the first time. Hell, the war started when the US decided it a good idea to bomb Iran during negotiations.
It is a profoundly untrustworthy country.
(Edit- missing negative)
Would you go to your normal job tomorrow if someone who has a history of carrying out threats has threatened to kill you for it?
I can spend 10 minutes looking at demographics and tell you the world is not explainable if the measuring stick is my own risk tolerances.
Between this and Ukraine, the logic of a nuclear warhead deterrent might be considered a paradigm relic from 20th century.
They can look at Ukraine who bitterly regrets giving up their nuclear weapons, or North Korea, seemingly invulnerable despite being the most pariah of pariah states.
From the perspective of the Iranian state, it would be idiotic and irresponsible not to try to make a nuclear weapon in these conditions.
“He said that the tariff is $1 per barrel of oil, adding that empty tankers can pass freely.
“‘Once the email arrives and Iran completes its assessment, vessels are given a few seconds to pay in bitcoin, ensuring they can’t be traced or confiscated due to sanctions,’ Hosseini added.”
"few seconds to pay in bitcoin, ensuring they can’t be traced or confiscated due to sanctions,’ Hosseini added"
Maybe I'm ignorant of Bitcoin but isn't Bitcoin transactions recorded in a public cryptographically signed ledger? Isn't that literally the opposite of "can't be traced"?
We just need to watch for large transactions with the Iranian flag and boat emojis…
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/iran-warns-tankers-they...
What is to stop the ships from lying ? I wonder if Iran will do spot check of some ships to prevent this. And will boarding ships cause Trump to have yet another breakdown ?
They can probably consistently lie by a small percentage and Iran let's them get the 3% discount as an acceptable loss.
This is why when cyberthreat actors steal millions in USD stablecoins by hacking a protocol or a large wallet, the very first thing they do is convert those stablecoins to something else.
Not only that the Chinese Yuan is probably more interesting given they can buy more things with it from China things like consumer tech/products, chemicals and rare earths for weapon systems etc.
Quite funny to read comments from people asking what use is crypto. Can tell they have probably never left West Virgina.
Don't think it would be that useful for Iran though as they are already RMB earners, and RMB financial markets are still a bit questionable (there is depth, I don't think anyone knows why this depth exists or what it is actually for, just state-linked banks moving paper between themselves furiously).
China has probably one on another blockchain but I am not sure how easy it is to exit their ecosystem or convert it to anything else...
Its successor USDS has implemented all the mechanisms to censor some addresses but if I remember correctly this hasn't been activated yet.
All the other ones: USDC, USDT, EURC and the ruble one can be whipped out easily. So more risky for them than good old dollars.
Please correct me if I missed something.
Edit: Piecing together from other comments, it sounds like these tolls are denominated in USD ($1 per barrel), but as an implementation detail, they're charging in BTC as the instrument of choice, not a stablecoin.
They phrase the tolls in USD "so the price is stable", and since the whole transaction is quick, BTC entails "just a small carry risk while holding". They sidestep the stablecoin technology, which is "risky for Iran because the top stablecoins could be freezed. They are centralized."
The latter comment was downvoted, possibly for paranoia, but Iran can't afford not to be paranoid. The major stablecoins at least claim to be custodied in Western institutions in a quasi-compliant-ish manner. If the USG started strong-arming Cantor, and so forth, who knows where that would end. Iran would much rather live with a tiny taste of BTC price volatility.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47692874
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47691369
So my read of this is:
- Iran is threading the needle, working within the limited options they have in a US-dominated world economy.
- The death of the petrodollar is slightly exaggerated here, although it's a small symbolic step, and obviously the broader war is going to have implications for US hegemony.
>“Once the email arrives and Iran completes its assessment, vessels are given a few seconds to pay in Bitcoin, ensuring they can’t be traced or confiscated due to sanctions,” FT reported, citing Hosseini.
https://beincrypto.com/iran-bitcoin-toll-hormuz-strait-tanke...
Details on this deal are sketchy but it seems like Iran will continue charging a toll for the Strait of Hormuz (of approximately $1/barrel). You hear figures like $2 million but bear in mind that VLCCs/ULCCs can carry 2M+ barrels of oil. Also, it seems like there will be significant sanctions relief.
Here's the problem: how does Iran get paid? Normally that would be through international payments systems but the US exerts a lot of control over those and can freeze assets as they've done in the past. Part of the payments under the previous JCPOA [3] were to return money paid to Iran for oil where those payments had been frozen. Russia got locked out of SWIFT after the Ukraine invasion [4] as another example.
So I see this as a defensive and potentially temporary move to avoid the risk of asset seizure and freezing should hostilities resume. Iran may well end up with access to international payments systems again in the coming weeks, at which point this could all change.
It is interesting that crypto is being used for this but that just goes to the point that the use case for crypto is to bypass laws. That's no different here.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Teutoburg_Forest
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cannae
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_nuclear_deal
[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWIFT_ban_against_Russian_bank...
The US being able to just cut off people from the financial system is seen as very problematic by anyone outside the US.
I wish it need not have happened in my time
But for the party with the most responsibility for blowing it all up I'd like to nominate Rupert Murdoch. Most visibly with Fox News, but really his entire media empire
Hear, hear.
I'm rooting for the fast uptake of STV across the US.
This conflict has been an interesting case of watching mass hysteria interact with propaganda in the newform, rapid pace of media that exists in the internet age. The amount of wild conjecture, speculation, misinformation is the most extreme I've ever seen it, eclipsing even the 6 months of nonsense that was spurred on by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
If there was another route, the oil would have found the way.
had the US had any real plan to empower the Gulf states against Iran there would already be backup routes
If there were viable alternatives to the Straight, the US would have attacked Iran decades ago. Every US administration has had people in the wings desperate to "Fix" the Iran situation, but only Trump was stupid enough to try it.
Meanwhile, the actual production is meaningfully damaged, and for at least a couple years.
This is an energy crisis.
Five years at 2mil per ship will make Iran rich.
Actually, this is extortion. Meaning that it is done under threat of violence. Worse yet, the US military may end up enforcing this, and collecting on a share of the fees.
It won't take very long for Iran to recoup the damages. After that, why keep the fees going? Because it's free money, that's why.
The strange this is, if the US and Iran can partner on this, that would lead to a weird peace, because they both stand to benefit, meanwhile countries that depend on the straight (Korea, Japan, etc.) have to pay the bill.
There are massive maintenance costs for the open sea with how we utilize it. Maritime security and policing, navigational infrastructure, weather reporting, radio repeaters, international bureaucracy, etc.
Global maritime trade is extremely costly. It's simply hidden behind opaque public spending on things you don't think about. In all likelihood it's a sunk cost that would ballpark around a few hundred billion dollars annually, invisible money spent just to keep things running at the scale and reliability that they do.
Now the maritime traffic passing through the Strait of Hormuz may only partially overlap with this spending, but people greatly overestimate just how "cheap" maritime activity actually is.
So basically, Iran say "here, you have to pass through our or Oman's waters, we will let you, but please pay a toll for the derangement, that we will share with Oman."
not really; you would have to pay to run an oil pipeline through another country's territory even if that country wasn't bearing the cost of maintaining the oil pipeline
the strait isn't international waters -- it's part of Iran and Oman's territorial waters
I think any such pretenses were abandoned right off the start.
Spain, Argentina, Kenya, Indonesia, Kuwait and countless other countries haven't bombed any civilian infrastructure either and yet they will be affected by the aggressive posture around international maritime traffic.
Are you expecting that Iran will not apply the fee to ships that sell oil Malesia or South Africa?
An American Iranian expert which studied this region for 20 years predicted that Iran will do a nuclear test in September, ahead of the mid-term elections. We'll see.
It’s just Pax for those parts of the world that America and its allies are not invading (and other non-allied examples like Russia invading Ukraine).
But a typical top-comment about how America Did a Bad Thing Which Ruined The Good American-lead Times.
Aren't you making the very point you purport to refute? What's so different about this than Rome circa 50 BC? They even invaded Persia!
Why are you taking what the Trump admin says at face value, anyways? Are you still a fool after all these years? This is like "fool me a 10,000th time" by now haaha
Oh crud I just opened a can of worms with that, didn't I?
Nuclear programme can only be stopped with boots on the ground.
America’s military is outdated compared to modern asymmetric warfare.
Iran may gain income from the strait.
It can now pursue a bomb knowing it will be hard to impossible for America to stop it.
I bet Trump will justify it as compensation for US “security” guarantees to Gulf States.
https://thehill.com/policy/international/5821343-trump-us-ir...
You might be talking about Israel too.
I truly cannot say.
Also of course if you want to profit, you can always just insider trade! A favorite of the administration. Someone bet a cool billion just yesterday that oil prices would go down. And would you believe it.