Key takeaways
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Libya’s cheap, subsidized electricity made it profitable to run even older, inefficient Bitcoin miners.
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At its peak, Libya is estimated to have generated around 0.6% of the global Bitcoin hash rate.
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Mining operates in a legal grey zone, with hardware imports banned but no clear law governing mining itself.
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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.
Did you know? Since 2011, Libya has had more than a dozen rival governments, militias or political centers of power, creating long periods in which no single authority could enforce national-level energy or economic policy.
The economics of “almost free” electricity
Libya’s mining boom starts with a number that looks almost unreal. Some estimates put the country’s electricity price at around $0.004 per kilowatt-hour, among the lowest in the world. That level is only possible because the state heavily subsidizes fuel and keeps tariffs artificially low, even as the grid struggles with damage, theft and underinvestment.
From an economic perspective, such pricing creates a powerful arbitrage for miners. You are effectively buying energy far below its real market cost and converting it into Bitcoin.
For miners, this changes the hardware equation completely. In high-cost markets, only the latest, most efficient ASICs stand a chance of staying profitable. In Libya, even older-generation machines that would be scrap metal in Europe or North America can still generate a margin, as long as they are fed with subsidized power.
That, naturally, makes the country attractive for foreign operators willing to ship in used rigs and accept legal and political risk.
Regional analyses suggest that, at its peak around 2021, Bitcoin mining in Libya may have consumed roughly 2% of the country’s total electricity output, about 0.855 terawatt-hours (TWh) a year.
In a wealthy, stable grid, that level of consumption might be manageable. In Libya, where rolling blackouts are already part of daily life, diverting that much subsidized power into privately run server rooms is a serious issue.
On the global mining map, the US, China and Kazakhstan still dominate in absolute hash rate, but Libya’s slice stands out precisely because it is achieved with a small population, damaged infrastructure and cheap electricity.
Did you know? Libya loses up to 40% of its generated electricity before it ever reaches homes because of grid damage, theft and technical losses, according to the General Electricity Company of Libya (GECOL).
Inside Libya’s underground mining boom
On the ground, Libya’s mining boom looks nothing like a glossy data center in Texas or Kazakhstan. Reports from Tripoli and Benghazi describe rows of imported ASICs crammed into abandoned steel and iron factories, warehouses and fortified compounds, often on the outskirts of cities or in industrial zones where heavy electricity use does not immediately raise eyebrows.
Did you know? To dodge detection, some operators in Libya reportedly pour cement over parts of their setups to blur heat signatures, making it harder for authorities to spot them using thermal imaging.
The timeline of enforcement shows how quickly this underground economy has grown. In 2018, the Central Bank of Libya declared virtual currencies illegal to trade or use, citing money laundering and terrorism-financing risks.
Yet by 2021, analysts estimated Libya was responsible for around 0.6% of the global Bitcoin hash rate, the highest share in the Arab world and Africa.
Since then, raids have revealed how deep the activity runs. In April 2024, security forces in Benghazi seized more than 1,000 devices from a single hub thought to be…
cointelegraph.com