How Cheap Power Turned Libya Into A Bitcoin Mining Hotspot 2025

Libya’s cheap power fueled a hidden Bitcoin mining boom, straining the grid and forcing authorities into an escalating crackdown.

Libya’s cheap, subsidized electricity made it profitable to run even older, inefficient Bitcoin miners.

At its peak, Libya is estimated to have generated around 0.6% of the global Bitcoin hash rate.

Mining operates in a legal grey zone, with hardware imports banned but no clear law governing mining itself.

Authorities now link illegal mining farms to power shortages and are ramping up raids and criminal cases.

In November 2025, Libyan prosecutors quietly handed down three-year prison sentences to nine people caught running Bitcoin miners inside a steel factory in the coastal city of Zliten.

The court ordered their machines seized and the illegally generated profits returned to the state, the latest in a series of high-profile raids that have swept from Benghazi to Misrata and even netted dozens of Chinese nationals operating industrial-scale farms.

Yet these crackdowns are targeting an industry that, until recently, most outsiders did not even know existed. In 2021, Libya, a country better known for oil exports and rolling blackouts, accounted for around 0.6% of the global Bitcoin hash rate. That put it ahead of every other Arab and African state and even several European economies, according to estimates from the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance.

This unlikely rise was driven by cheap, heavily subsidized electricity and a long period of legal and institutional ambiguity that allowed miners to spread faster than lawmakers could react.

In the sections that follow, we will unpack how Libya became a covert mining hotspot, why its grid is now under severe strain and what the government’s escalating crackdown means for Bitcoin (BTC) miners operating in fragile states.

Source: CoinTelegraph