Bitcoin

Holding bitcoin earns nothing: the protocol pays only miners, with new coins and fees, for securing the network.

Riba means interest, or any fixed increase on a loan. The Bitcoin whitepaper and code pay new coins (the block subsidy, 3.125 BTC per block since the April 2024 halving) plus transaction fees only to miners, in exchange for proof-of-work. Nothing in the protocol lends money or pays holders a return, so simply holding BTC produces no income and the score is the maximum. Interest appears only in products built around Bitcoin, such as lending protocols where supplier yields come from borrower interest; these are assessed under trading mechanisms and do not change the asset itself.

Bitcoin is a working network with real use; Islamic Finance Guru rates it permissible as a digital asset.

Mal is property that Islamic law recognises as having value and that can be owned and traded. Bitcoin plainly works: it has run since its genesis block on 3 January 2009, and its hashrate was about 969 EH/s on 16 September 2026. Islamic Finance Guru, the first-priority authoritative source, rates Bitcoin permissible and treats it as a digital asset; Malaysia's Securities Commission Shariah Advisory Council (2020) also classes such digital currency as goods ('urudh) tradable on registered exchanges.

Bitcoin is not a gambling product, but trading around it is dominated by leveraged derivatives.

Maysir is gambling: gaining or losing by chance rather than through real exchange. Ordinary price swings are not maysir, and Bitcoin has a real function as a settlement network and a store of value, with no lottery-like mechanics. However, derivatives made up 79.3% of centralised-exchange crypto volume in August 2026 ($3.40 trillion of $4.29 trillion), and big moves are often driven by leverage, such as the late-August 2026 rally from about $62,000 to $80,000, powered mainly by short covering.

There is no issuing company; new coins go only to miners as payment for validating transactions.

The revenue thresholds (below 5% from clearly impermissible sources, below 20% from disputed ones) apply to an issuer's or a protocol's economics. Bitcoin has no issuer, no treasury and no reserves: bitcoin.org describes a network that nobody owns or controls. The only income in the system is what miners earn, the block subsidy plus transaction fees, which is payment for a service. Fees are small today, about $237,000 a day on average in late August and early September 2026. None of this income comes from interest, gambling or prohibited industries, so impermissible revenue is effectively 0%.

Supply, code and rules are public and checkable by anyone; the risks that remain are concentration and technology, not hidden terms.

Gharar is excessive uncertainty about what is being bought. Bitcoin's 21 million cap is a consensus rule that every node checks; about 20,085,368 BTC (95.64%) existed on 16 September 2026, with no premine and no unlocks. The code is open source, and rule changes need broad agreement: in August 2026 the BIP-110 soft fork got only about 2.5% of miner signalling and failed.

Bitcoin is used mainly as a store of value, an investment and a settlement network; illicit use is a small share.

The main uses are permissible: long-term saving, investment through spot holdings and funds, and transfers. US spot Bitcoin ETFs held about $103 billion on 3 September 2026, and BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust alone reported net assets of about $59.7 billion on 15 September 2026. Chainalysis estimates that illicit addresses received less than 1% of attributed on-chain crypto volume in 2025, and stablecoins, not Bitcoin, carried 84% of that; a Bitcoin-only share is not published. There is no sign of a notable share of disputed use specific to Bitcoin.

Bitcoin can be bought fully paid on the spot and held directly, and plain spot funds exist.

Fully paid spot purchase with immediate delivery is widely available on regulated platforms, including exchanges registered with Malaysia's Securities Commission, whose Shariah Advisory Council allows trading on them. The Halogen Shariah Bitcoin Fund in Malaysia, advised by Amanie Advisors, held 99.75% bitcoin and 0.25% cash on 30 April 2026, and the iShares Bitcoin Trust holds bitcoin and non-interest-bearing cash. Permissible ownership is therefore fully available, and the score is the maximum; margin and futures are not permissible and are assessed separately below.

Bitcoin offers open, hard-to-censor saving and transfer; its energy use and misuse are real but moderate harms.

Maslahah is the balance of benefit and harm to society. On the benefit side, Bitcoin gives anyone access to a savings and transfer network without a bank, and the Human Rights Foundation's Bitcoin Development Fund has funded nearly 300 projects in 62 countries, focused on open-source privacy and censorship-resistance tools for human rights defenders under authoritarian regimes. On the harm side, Cambridge (April 2025) estimated mining uses about 138 TWh a year, about 0.5% of global electricity, with 52.4% of its energy from renewables and nuclear.