Kosovo has banned cryptocurrency mining to limit electricity use as it battles an energy crisis caused by a spike in global prices.
Their government states that the security services will identify and suppress the sources of cryptocurrency mining.
Mining is energy intensive and involves the verification of digital transactions in order to obtain cryptocurrencies as a reward.
While the whole of Europe is facing a sharp rise in prices, Kosovo has started restrictions due to electricity shortages.
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Kosovo's largest coal-fired power plant was shut down last month due to technical problems, forcing the government to import electricity at high prices.
A 60-day state of emergency, declared in December, gave the government the ability to allocate more money to energy imports and impose tighter restrictions on electricity consumption.
Electricity restrictions led to protests and calls for the resignation of Economy Minister Artana Rizvanoli.
Energy prices are skyrocketing across Europe for a variety of reasons, such as low shipments from Russia and high demand for natural gas, as economies recover from the Covid-19 pandemic.
That jump was fueled by geopolitical tensions with Russia, which supplies a third of Europe's gas.
Russia has rejected European accusations that it has cut gas supplies as tensions rise over the conflict in eastern Ukraine.
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Kosovo was hit harder than others.
The authorities announced last month that Kosovo imports 40 percent of its energy consumption.
On Tuesday, Rizvanoli said the government decided to ban so-called cryptocurrency mining to mitigate the effects of the global energy crisis.
Mining cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin involves connecting computers - usually specialized "mining machines" - to a currency network on the Internet.
By providing the computing power to verify transactions on that network, the owners of mining machines are rewarded with newly generated currency, making the whole process potentially lucrative.
However, this requires a lot of computing power, which uses huge amounts of electricity.
According to an earlier analysis by the University of Cambridge, Bitcoin mining uses more electricity annually than all of Argentina.
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Until recently, Kosovo could boast of one of the cheapest electricity prices in Europe.
In such an environment, cryptomining has become popular among young people.
This practice is particularly popular in the northern areas of Kosovo, where ethnic Serbs, who do not recognize the state's independence, refuse to pay electricity bills.
Concerned about the environmental impact of the practice, other countries, such as China and Iran, have cracked down on cryptomining networks.
Iran announced a four-month ban last year because the practice was draining more than two gigawatts of electricity from the grid every day.
Fourteen years after the declaration of independence, Kosovo was recognized by about 100 countries. However, the exact number is not known.
Pristina cites a figure of 117 countries, and in Belgrade they say that there are far fewer.
Among the countries of the European Union that have not recognized Kosovo are Spain, Slovakia, Cyprus, Greece and Romania, and when it comes to world powers, they are Russia, China, Brazil and India.
Since 2008, Kosovo has become a member of several international organizations, such as the IMF, the World Bank and FIFA, but not the United Nations.
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