Kosovo, a small country in south-eastern Europe which is plagued by poverty and crisis, has found at least one solution to its widespread unemployment problem - Cryptocurrency Mining. How? Due to the availability of cheap electricity there. Mining of cryptocurrencies is a process of generating new units of cryptocurrency through computing power which requires a lot of electricity.
Kosovo has the third-cheapest electricity in Europe at around 7 euro cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh), which equals to 8 U.S. cents kWh and can be compared to about 19 U.S. cents in Britain. Coin mining is especially popular in northern Kosovo, which has a majority of Serbs who do not recognize Kosovo’s official authorities and refuse to pay for power at all.
Many young English-speaking, computer-savvy entrepreneurs are taking up cryptocurrency mining even though the most famous cryptocurrency bitcoin has dropped its prices since last December.
"Kosovars find cryptocurrencies an alluring investment," Ermal Sadiku, a software engineer, and cryptocurrency expert was quoted as saying to Reuters. "Secondly, there was a lot of dirty money around - and cryptocurrency investment was a fast way to get rid of it."
While the country is leveraging cheap electricity, the government is yet to acknowledge cryptos.