Kosovo is not a wealthy country, considered one of the poorest in Europe, based on mining and energy production, giving it one of the lowest electricity prices/household globally, said to be close to that of Kyrgyzstan at $0.010/KWh.  Because of that low energy cost, bitcoin miners forced to leave China after government bans over energy consumption, migrated to Kosovo to take advantage of such low energy prices to mine cryptocurrencies.  Unfortunately bitcoin miners are on the move again, as the country issued a ban earlier this month halting all bitcoin mining for 60 days, due to power plant closures (Kosovo has two) and the high cost of importing energy.
According to the University of Cambridge, the amount of power required to generate 1 bitcoin is 150,000 KWh, or roughly the power requirements of 170 US households per month, and spread out across the globe, the power needed to generate bitcoin is 118.8 TWh/year, more than the total energy consumption of Argentina, so bitcoin miners tend to be focused on locations with cheap energy.  However, with coal production issues facing a number of countries, including China, and COVID-19 limiting available staff, even those countries that might have invited bitcoin miners before the pandemic, are now limiting or outright banning energy use for bitcoin mining.  Where will bitcoin miners go next?
Here’s where electricity is cheap, as of 6/2021:

There are lots of game types that can be accessed through the internet, such as RTS (Real-time strategy), FPS (First person shooter), RPG (Role Playing), Simulation (like “The Sims”), MMOG (Massive Multi-player), and Sandbox, but recently a new genre has appeared, that of P2E (Play to Earn).  While game companies have always found ways in which they can recover the cost of developing and supporting on-line games, players are not in the same position in most cases as there is the cost of the game software in some instances and the fact that gamers can (in some games) buy certain objects that help them through the game or give them status.  Those objects are paid for with real cash and while there are some external quasi-markets for such objects, game companies will ban users who buy or sell objects outside of the game world.
That said, the idea of P2E games, which are an extension of cryptocurrencies, stems from a number of games where only the top few competitors could earn actual currency when battling other top competitors in events sponsored by gaming platforms.  However P2E 2.0 now finds that a number of on-line P2E games have appeared where the average rank and file player can actually ‘earn’ cryptocurrency inside the game and transfer that crypto to currency outside of the game through NFTs or similar block chain systems.   While this all sounds a bit iffy, the key to such games are NFTs, which are generated by players as they progress through the game.  In order not to over-supply the market (NFT inflation) and decrease the value of generated NFTs, some algorithms allocate ‘rarity’ to certain objects which limits the overall growth rate of NFTs in a particular game, and each new P2E game tries to build a better ‘economy’ than previous games, given the economic structure of each are in the block chain for public examination.
So is this a bad thing or a way in which gamers can generate income, rather than have the game be a cost?  It’s not quite that simple, despite some games advertising that you can earn over $6.00 each day, as such games become so popular within days of release, that sites crash, making it difficult for those who like the game for itself and are not interested in creating a profit center.  It is also difficult to get earned money out of the games as this excerpt would indicate.

“It is necessary to withdraw the mined Ninky Coin (aka Idle Ninja Online Token - $NINKY) to the electronic wallet Metamask (browser extension/mobile app that is a secure repository for your in-game tokens) and purchase Binance Coins (a cryptocurrency exchange platform currency) to pay a ‘gas’ fee (whatever) and send it back to Metamask.  Even after swapping and selling it can be converted into cash through the process of sending it back to the domestic exchange”  Simple, right?
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Stories of users renting hundreds of computers for 3 days to mine in such games, producing over $330,000 in profits have circulated, inciting a new rash of users to jump into the P2E business, along with those who are willing (for a fee) to teach others how to mine and profit when playing such games.  In many countries, such games are illegal because they encourage speculation, as the value of in-game NFTs can swing wildly on a minute-to-minute basis, but many gamers resort to VPNs to hide their identities and create multiple user entities, making it difficult for governments to rein in such speculation.   While there are still a number of P2E games that have developed over time, a few have also been cancelled as platform owners were afraid that they would be targeted by government organizations as providing a platform for such speculation, regardless of the game itself.  To understand such volatility, we included a price chart for Binance Coin, one of the less volatile cryptos.  The site lists 8,558 different cryptocurrencies on a daily basis with today’s top winner Scar Token) up 718.49% (to $0.00000009333) over the last 24 hours and today’s loser Railnode, down 98.86% (to $0.05449) over the same period.  That’s volatility…

​Xinhua News Agency, the official press agency of the People’s Republic of China, is the largest media group in China, and is the media arm of the Chinese Communist Party.  While a vast news agency, Xinhua also is responsible for the dissemination of state propaganda, a conflict that appears almost daily as it condemns any criticism of state policies while reporting the news gathered by its news bureaus across China and the globe.  Only a few weeks ago, the People’s Daily, the companion newspaper to Xinhua’s broader media reach, had been speaking out about the increasing excitement surrounding the use of NFT (Non-Fungible Tokens) based investments, citing the prospects as ‘a zero-sum game hyped by cryptocurrency investors’, with the potential for investor losses, having already banned cryptocurrency mining and  trading.
That said, the Chinese government, despite the warnings, has not banned NFTs or the Metaverse itself, leaving open the prospects for NFT based investing and Metaverse development open to the Chinese people and businesses, and as we have noted frequently, a rash of virtual real estate companies have been hawking plots of ‘land’ in virtual space, along with a collection of companies selling both virtual items and digital media using NFTs to guarantee exclusive ownership through block chain transactions.  But nothing is stranger that the idea that on Christmas Eve the Xinhua News Agency itself will be issuing the country’s first ‘news digital collectibles’, a collection of over 100,000 selected ‘2021 commemorative news photos’ that will be given away for free, using NFTs, with the idea of promoting block chain rather than the speculation on the price of digital assets.
While the county has banned cryptocurrencies, stating that they are not legal and cannot be used as currency, NFTs are more of a means to an end for any kind of transaction (digital or physical), which puts them in a grey area.  That lack of definition is giving Chinese companies the ability to issue what are called digital collectables, with NFTs keeping track of both transactions and ownership.  Such collectables can range from e-mails or text from important or famous people to digital artwork or the aforementioned virtual real estate. 
While the Chinese government seems a bit more in tune with the digital world (listen to the questions asked by US congressmen during the recent digital media hearings if you doubt this), there seems to still be a bit of a divide between rules that are to ‘protect Chinese consumers from potential fraud’, ending the use of bitcoin and mining, and the potential for revenue from the sale of digital assets that have a value based on a highly speculative and unregulated market.  NFTs are block chain based as are cryptocurrencies, so it becomes difficult to tell the difference between why the government would ban bitcoin mining and not the sale of digital assets owned by an individual or corporate entity. 
One could make the case that as bitcoin could be mined and therefore supply could be increased leading to the devaluation of the asset, the owner of a digital asset can also duplicate that asset electronically before it is sold, as long as the sales are made under the disclosure that there are X number of exact digital copies of the asset.  While that might lower the value, just as multiple prints of artwork lower the value of each, mining bitcoin does the same.  These are new and complex issues that in many countries will face endless legal challenges, while in China, the government will make those determinations, and so it seems that buying Chinese digital assets could eventually face the same fate as bitcoin, pulling 1.45b potential buyers out of the digital market.  NFTs are a vehicle for digital transactions just as NFTs are, so its something to think about before buying Chinese digital assets.