Crypto miners are suffering from the currency crypto crash. Even Bitcoin, the uncrowned king of cryptocurrency has been trading at around $3500, which represents over 80 percent drop from its all-time high of $20,000 in late 2017.

At this time, energy cost becomes a key factor of mining profit. Some of the miners choose to quit while others are seeking cheaper electricity. Iran, the Middle East country is fast becoming a new destination for Chinese miners to make a profit. They are lured in by the low electricity cost in the nation.

It was reported that Iran exported about 43 billion kWh of power to its neighbors between March 2013 to March 2018 and earned $4.1 billion in revenue from it.

Iranian electricity producer is forced to sell electricity at a low price as this country is lack of stable power buyers.

However, the political and regulatory issues are stopping miners from migrating. According to BitcoinExchangeGuide, Iran has banned the importation of mining rigs into the nation. Which means, which means if Chinese miners want to operate their mining business in Iran, their mining devices may still be prevented from entering the country after 20 days water transport.

It was reported that Iranian customs official are currently holding about 40,000 mining rigs. In addition, mining in Iran is not protected by law, Iranian authorities may ban any domestic mining center if they want to.

However, nothing can stop miners from seeking cheap electricity. In last October, Chandler Guo, the well-known Chinese cryptocurrency angel investor sent a Weibo, asking for the regions offer the cheapest electricity, and he promised that the introducer would get rewarded in 100 Bitcoins.

Four days later, Guo said he finally found a country in the Middle East with electricity as low as 4 cents RMB per hour and called to crypto mining operators to go for a field trip.

The place Guo talked about is Iran, the country under the U.S. sanctions. There are many big mining operators and investors in China showing great interest in Iran.

Zhu Fa, founder of mining pool Pookin.com disclosed that miners are purchasing second-hand mining devices and send them to countries in Russia, eastern Europe, central Asia and Iran, they prefer to using the cheap and high energy-consumption miners in mining factories with low electricity but the operation are not that stable.