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 at all. Interest appears only in products built around Bitcoin: lending protocols such as Aave state that supplier yields are funded by borrower interest. Third-party schemes like Babylon, which pay rewards for locking BTC, are disputed.

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. The creator is pseudonymous, but no team controls the network.

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. In the US, the iShares Bitcoin Trust holds bitcoin and non-interest-bearing cash, and its custodian may not lend or pledge the bitcoin without the Trust's consent.

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.