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”Hosseini said that each tanker must email authorities about its cargo, after which Iran will inform them of the toll to be paid in digital currencies. “He sai
by pavlov 6mo ago
”Hosseini said that each tanker must email authorities about its cargo, after which Iran will inform them of the toll to be paid in digital currencies.
“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.”
- gustavus 6mo agoSo apart from all the geopolitics of it this line is interesting "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"?
- zulux 6mo agoAnd if you knew the manifests (quantity of oil) for the ship, just the value of the bitcount transaction could be used for tracking.
- mbreese 6mo agoOr, if you knew the bitcoin addresses, you could figure out exactly how much oil is being moved. I would think oil data analysts would love to have access to that data (if they don't already).
- Esophagus4 6mo agoIt’s like those podcasters that figure out who’s dating whom by looking through their Venmo. We just need to watch for large transactions with the Iranian flag and boat emojis…
- dragonelite 6mo agoThere a whole industry called on chain analysis that do this sort of work.
- deltoidmaximus 6mo agoAs bitcoin is quite traceable I don't see how this works if you're trying to avoid sanctions. For Iran it probably doesn't matter but for the vessel owners it probably does.
- tomasphan 6mo agoBusiness idea - Iran Bitcoin fee intermediary. Realistically the CIA will handle this for US companies and maybe allies until they figure something out.
- CapricornNoble 6mo agoDidn't Tornado Cash get un-sanctioned recently? Can't you just use that?
- iugtmkbdfil834 6mo agoYes, from sanctions perspective, the vessel owners seem to have more exposure than Iran -- as crazy as it sounds on the surface.
- palata 6mo agoAgreed, but I wonder it if matters in practice. It's not like one can boycott bitcoins by serial number or something, is it?
- polivier 6mo agoKind of: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/7966/what-are-tainted-coins-exactly https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/7966/what-are-ta...
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- insane_dreamer 6mo agothe issue is the US' ability to freeze USD bank accounts on its soil or pressuring other banks to do the same
- jmclnx 6mo agoCannot get to the article, so: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/iran-warns-tankers-theyll-be-sunk-if-they-cross-strait-without-permission-and-demand-bitcoin-fees/ar-AA20qXRD 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 ?
- bethekidyouwant 6mo agoLying about their cargo? Can’t lie about the weight … Probably the savings from lying about the nature of the cargo is not worth the risk of exploding..
- onlypassingthru 6mo agoBecause ship displacement is really hard to disguise? It's probably like trying to sneak your friend in to the movies under your overcoat.
- HWR_14 6mo agoOil is heavy. The ship designs are known. You can tell approximately how full a ship is by how deep it sinks into the water/where the waterline is. They can probably consistently lie by a small percentage and Iran let's them get the 3% discount as an acceptable loss.
- NoLinkToMe 6mo agoEven if ship displacement wasn't an observable thing, there's no real reason that empty oil ships enter the strait, and then again leave empty, after having obviously docked at an oil terminal, on any regular basis. Public and observable information makes it trivial to make high-accuracy assessments about the veracity of the claim. And $2m is sufficient budget to finance spot checks, especially given you'd have to apply them to an exceedingly small percentage of ships. A year salary of an average Iranian police guard is about 5k, for context. Plus you can create a scenario where fraud being detected is prohibitively expensive, and may even result in the captain being imprisoned in Iran. I wouldn't expect a lot of lies.