Iran currently has a protest going on as a result of the 22-year-old Iranian woman named Mahsa Amini’s death. She reportedly suffered severe beatings from the morality police for wearing her hijab incorrectly; she went into a coma and was later pronounced dead.
Iranians are taking to the streets following the suspicious death of #MahsaAmini.
Iran should stop repressing protests and instead investigate her death, provide justice to her family, and abolish the compulsory hijab law. pic.twitter.com/PKBXkWACtu
— Human Rights Watch (@hrw) September 25, 2022
Iranian women are protesting against laws that forbid dancing, the wearing of the headscarf by women, and the need that women to obtain their fathers’ permission before getting married. After Amini’s death, women have flocked to social media to post videos of themselves cutting their hair in protest. They want gender discrimination to stop, and as a form of protest, they dance and burn their scarves in public.
Amini was held in custody and murdered by the morality police after they saw a part of her hair that was not well covered by her hijab. Following this tragedy, a protest began, and approximately 400 protestors were murdered by police. These protesters put their lives in danger to oppose the brutal government.
They argued that in their homeland, they were being treated like prisoners. The Islamic Republic of Iran even shut down the internet as a result of this outcry. Some contend that although males, including morality policemen, are free to express themselves, and bind their spouses, this constitutes gender inequity. The protest was channeled towards women being granted the freedom to show their attractiveness as well.
According to Hossein Jalali, a representative of the Islamic Council’s culture council, the headscarf should once again be worn by women. He further added that the government will follow a procedure in which defiant women will receive a text message telling them to respect the legislation and the hijab regulation before moving on to the warning stage and, finally, possibly having their bank accounts frozen.
This unfairness threatens the freedom of expression of women. Since the advent of decentralized finance, cryptocurrency has been a saving grace for many. User privacy is guaranteed and there is no need for a third party during transaction processes. Hence, cryptocurrency is a viable alternative if their bank accounts are restricted.
To bypass U.S. transactions imposed on Iran’s banking and finance field, the Iranian authorities legalized the usage of cryptocurrency funds to pay for overseas importation of goods for the first time in August 2022. Making use of a total of $10 million in cryptocurrencies.
Some cryptocurrency initiatives include teaching Persian-speaking students to code in Ethereum, the Iranian government formally recognizing cryptocurrency mining in 2019, and more.
Miners were then asked to register, pay electricity fees, and sell any bitcoin they had mined to the central bank of Iran. Iranians mined more than 186 million dollars worth of bitcoin between 2015 and 2021, and their yearly Bitcoin mining rate currently stands at well over one billion dollars on a national scale. Although the cryptocurrency Iran used to purchase the products wasn’t made public.
