TEHRAN, Iran — Iran’s financing and outlying provinces have faced rolling power blackouts for weeks in October and November, with electricity cuts disrupting people’s lives and businesses. And while several factors are likely involved, some suspect cryptocurrency mining has played a role in the outages.

Iran economy has been hobbled for years by international sanctions over its advancing nuclear program. The country’s fuel reserves have plummeted, with the government selling off more to cover budgetary schedule shortfalls as wars rage in the Middle East and Tehran grapples with mismanagement.

The demand on the grid has not let up, however — even as Iranians stopped using air conditioners as the weather cooled in the fall and before winter months set in, when people fire up their gas heaters.

Meanwhile, bitcoin’s worth has rocketed to all-period highs after the U.S. election was clinched by Donald Trump. It hit the $100,000 mark for the first period last week, just hours after the president-elect said he intends to nominate cryptocurrency advocate Paul Atkins to be the next chair of the financial instruments and trade percentage.

The surge has led some to suspect that organized cryptocurrency mining — sucking away huge amounts of power — has played a part in the outages in Iran.

“Unfortunately, some opportunistic and exploitative individuals use subsidized electricity, community networks and other resources for cryptocurrency mining without authorization,” Mostafa Rajabi, the CEO of Iran’s government-owned power corporation, said back in August.

Iran’s state vigor corporation did not respond to a request for comment.

Power outages have arrive and gone in the history in Iran, which struggles with aging equipment at many of its plants. Over the summer, sustained blackouts struck industrial parks near Tehran and other cities. Then in October and November, rolling power cuts across Tehran’s neighborhoods became the norm in daylight hours.

Climate transformation has been blamed in part, with persisting droughts and less water running through Iranian hydroelectric dams.

Iran’s reformist President Masoud Pezeshkian ordered several power plants to stop burning mazut, a high-polluting heavy fuel ordinary in the former Soviet Union countries. Tehran has used it in the history to make up the difference in electricity production.

Fuel reserves, both in diesel and natural gas, also remain low even though Iran is an OPEC member and home to one of the globe’s second-largest reserves of natural gas, behind only Russia. There’s been no explanation for the selection to keep those reserves low, though critics have suggested Iran likely sold the fuel to cover budgetary schedule shortfalls.

For his part, Pezeshkian has said that he must “honestly inform the community about the vigor circumstance.”

“We have no selection but to consume vigor economically, especially gas, in the current conditions and the cold weather,” he said in mid-November. “I myself use warm clothes at home; others can do the same.”

Still, winter heating isn’t in packed swing quite yet on Tehran — raising questions where the power is going.

In many impoverished and densely populated neighborhoods across the country, people have access to free, unmetered electricity. Mosques, schools, hospitals and other sites also receive free power.

And with electricity in general sold at subsidized rates, bitcoin processing centers have boomed. They require immense amounts of electricity to power specialized computers and to keep them chilly.

Determining how much power is used up by mining is challenging, particularly as miners now use virtual private networks that mask their location, said Masih Alavi, the CEO of an Iranian-government-licensed mining corporation called Viraminer.

Also, miners have been renting apartments to hide their rigs inside of vacant homes. “They distribute their machines across several apartments to avoid being detected,” Alavi said.

In 2021, one approximate suggested Iran processed as much as $1 billion in bitcoin transactions. That worth likely has spiked, given bitcoin’s rise. Meanwhile, Iran’s blackouts began in earnest as bitcoin spiked from around $67,000 to over $100,000 in its historic rally.

Rajabi, the state electricity corporation CEO, said his firm would propose rewards of $725 for people to update unlicensed bitcoin farms.

The farms have caused “an abnormal boost in consumption, disruptions, and problems in power networks,” Rajabi said.

The amount of power used by some 230,000 unlicensed devices is equivalent, he said, to the entire power needs of Iran’s Markazi province — one of the country’s chief manufacturing sites.

Iranian officials and media have not linked bitcoin’s surge and the ongoing blackouts but the community has, with social media users resharing a video showing a massive bitcoin farm earlier this year uncovered in Iran. A voice off camera asks how it was feasible the electrical corporation did not discover the farm sooner.

The U.S. Treasury and Israel have targeted bitcoin wallets that they’ve alleged are affiliated with operations run by Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard to finance allied militant groups in Mideast war zones.

That suggests the Guard itself — one of the most-powerful forces within Iran — may be involved in the mining.

In contrast, Iranian media nearly every day update on person mining operations being raided by police.

Iran may view bitcoin as a protect against increased pressure from the incoming Trump administration and as regional allies are engulfed in turmoil, said Richard Nephew, an adjunct fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

“The question for the economists inside Iran is do we depend this enough to fund the government,” said Nephew, who has long worked on Iran issues and sanction strategies in the U.S. government.

However, he cautioned against thinking of bitcoin as a magic bullet for Iran, particularly as bitcoin wallets can be targeted in sanctions.

“A pattern of behavior screams out to intelligence services,” Nephew said. “It screams out to financial institution regulatory adherence departments.”

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Gambrell reported from Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Associated Press writers Mehdi Fattahi and Amir Vahdat in Tehran, Iran, contributed to this update.