I believe US monetary policy does a lot of sanctions against countries right now. There are many on the, "do not do any business with list." The SEC policies help police this as far as I know.
I might use the Antminer to go after BitcoinLE. I'm not sure if it will work or not at this point but I need to compile a Linux version of the mining software and test it out. This is a very low energy requiring coin that uses SHA256d and there is not a lot of mining on it yet. Basically it only mines every so often when a metronome signals a new block is ready for mining. This saves a lot of energy on CPU and GPU mining but I'm not sure if ASIC's will save much power. CPU mining is all washed up at this point but GPU might be worth trying if I can get that working. Just one of these Antminers don't take much power though (much less than a CPU or GPU) and it might produce some coins if I can get it working.
If the hash rate goes up, I'll probably throw it back into retirement again, I hate to waste power when I don't need to.
I thought about buying a used antminer online... but don't know how bad they get with reuse tbh, need to search BitcoinLE, first time hearing about it, but that whole metronome signal sounds really good and power saving! Doesn't it have security issues?
I might try to mine with my MSI GTX970 OC... need to get a script running on my other pc...
I am not sure I would purchase any SHA-256 specific hardware at this point unless you like playing around with stuff. There seems to be many better opportunities out there now for making coins.
Any low hash rate PoW coin has security issues. Usually the hash rate goes up as the coin gets more valuable though.