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Kosovo bans cryptocurrency mining after blackouts:
The government says security services will identify and clamp down on sources of cryptocurrency mining.
The mining is energy intensive and involves verifying digital transactions to get cryptocurrencies as a reward.
While all of Europe faces sharp price rises, Kosovo is enforcing rolling blackouts amid an electricity shortage.
The Balkan state's largest coal-fired power plant was shut down last month over a technical issue, forcing the government to import electricity at high prices.
A 60-day state of emergency, declared in December, gave the government powers to allocate more money for energy imports and impose stricter restrictions on power usage.
The blackouts have sparked protests and calls for the resignation of Economy Minister Artane Rizvanolli.
Energy prices are skyrocketing across Europe for various reasons, including low supplies from Russia and high demand for natural gas as economies recover from the Covid-19 pandemic.
The spike has been fuelled by geopolitical tensions with Russia, which supplies one third of Europe's gas. Russia has rejected European accusations that it has limited gas deliveries while tensions are raised
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 08 2022, @02:52PM (4 children)
1. The cost, both to produce fiat currency, and to the encirclement, is much lower.
2. There's no limit to how much fiat currency can be produced. There's only a fixed number of coins for cryptocurrency, and when they're gone, they're gone. How you gonna mine more? At that point, the gold rush is over and the cryptocurrency collapses.
There's also the issue of permanent loss of cryptocurrency - there's plenty of couns that can no longer be used for anything because the password is lost.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 08 2022, @03:17PM (3 children)
Could you expand on this meaning of "encirclement"? I see it's a military term, perhaps in a currency context it has something to do with the army of the country that issues the currency?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday January 08 2022, @06:11PM
A military historian might well call an encirclement an investment.
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Saturday January 08 2022, @10:34PM (1 child)
Looks like an auto correct of what should have been "environment".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 08 2022, @11:17PM
Yep. Damn auto correct strikes again. Even after you've supposedly turned it off, stupid browser still uses it "because it can't be turned off in the browser - for your convenience."
Maybe I'll change the system language to something else and auto-correct won't try to fix english … or try to sanitize certain "bad words."
And people seriously want me to consider Idiot-of-Things devices? Maybe I can sell an NFT of my saying "fuck off."