The rial, Iran’s official currency, failed in 2026. Hyperinflation eats away at savings every day. Sanctions add up to bad decisions and endless geopolitical pressure. Every day, people wake up with less money. Families rush to buy basics as everything they saved disappears. This sounds all too familiar to me. Lebanon went through the exact same crisis starting in late 2019. The same kind of banking freeze, the same crash of worthless currency, the same desperate search for anything of value. Bitcoin then turned out to be that safe financial haven. Signs are that he is now doing the same in Iran.
Beirut and Tehran are caught in the same mess
Lebanon hit a wall when banks blocked its accounts. Dollar savings stagnated and then devalued sharply into a pound that continued to collapse. More than 90 percent have disappeared. Lines at ATMs turned into fights. Protests broke out everywhere. Money sent by relatives abroad became the only lifeline, but even those funds had difficulty arriving and cost a lot in fees.
Iran faces the same strangulation. The sanctions cut off normal trade. Inflation is going crazy. Reports put crypto activity close to $8 billion in 2025. People are quickly taking Bitcoin directly to their personal wallets. They are worried about frost or major falls. Even the central bank takes over stablecoins like Tether to circumvent restrictions.
In Lebanon, attitudes changed rapidly. People who once ignored Bitcoin started turning to it because nothing else worked. Peer-to-peer exchanges skyrocketed everywhere, esp. in Telegram groups. No banks needed. The shipments arrived clean. The corner stores took it like bread or gasoline. An entire underground economy continued to function while the official one died.
The harsh reality of Lebanon’s collapse
Banks not only stopped withdrawals. They took pieces out of the warehouses. The promised dollars became local currency that was worth almost nothing. Trust disappeared overnight. People who planned carefully lost retirement money, business cash, and everything built over decades.
Bitcoin surpassed that. It allowed policyholders to keep something that no policy could touch or inflate. Having private keys in hardware wallets meant real control. Verify the transactions yourself. Remittances crossed borders in minutes, without intermediaries. There were price rises and falls, but in the long term it held up much better than the pound.
The problems remained real. The power was constantly cut off. Internet went down. Outside Beirut, liquidity remained tight. At first, many were burned by shady services because they didn’t know any better. However, groups emerged quickly. Online chats, meetings in cafes. People taught each other: backup seeds correctly, run your own node, bypass custodians. The crisis forced us to learn quickly. The clearest lesson became: leave Bitcoin with someone else and risk losing it due to hacks, freezes, or sudden rule changes. True ownership means the keys are under your control.
What Iran can learn from Lebanon’s experience
Iran follows a similar path. The protests show overflowing anger. The rial continues to fall. Onchain data makes it clear that people are moving to self-custody to block seizures or worse inflation.
The government’s signals are confused. The limits on mining clash with tests that use cryptocurrencies for imports. However, for ordinary people, Bitcoin remains simple: no one stops transfers, there are no borders blocking it, the value is kept outside of state control. Stablecoins cover the day to day. Bitcoin is savings.
Practices that worked in Lebanon are directly transferred. Find a reliable non-custodial wallet and back up your seed phrase. Create a peer-to-peer network for when fiat money comes in or goes out. These basic concepts allowed the Lebanese people to emerge victorious from the worst. They offer the same opportunity in Iran.
Of course, obstacles persist: the rules change, the Internet fails in some places, prices fluctuate. Still it is better to remain totally tied to a currency that keeps failing. Lebanon showed that waiting for the government to fix things rarely works. Early action saved what could be saved.
Regain control when systems fail
Lebanon and Iran show how quickly centralized finance is collapsing. Overprinting, account blocking and economic isolation mean that innocent citizens always suffer the blow. Bitcoin changes the game: no approval required, no one else is at risk if the keys remain yours.
Lebanon’s collapse forever changed its economy. Money went from being a survival tool to becoming a survival tool, forcing people to learn about custody and real ownership. Iran now faces the same lesson: depend on failed banks or adopt the tool that restores power.
The sharp drop in the rial indicates more than just trouble. Drive change. Lebanon produced tougher people who learned what appropriation really means. Iran also has the possibility to do so. Move before more disappear. Check everything yourself. Build stacks. Keep the wrenches tight. Create true freedom. Nobody gives it to him. You claim it, one satoshi at a time.
