Do Bitcoiners know what happened in Albania circa 1996?

I find it fascinating that anti-bitcoiners always use the myth of the tulip bubble to dissuade people from investigating it, and signalling their superiority. The tulip bubble was largely invented by a journalist in the mid 19th century who lost all his money on the railroad bubble, and projected onto other people in a different country who were too dead to defend themselves a narrative that was really about him and his profligate peers.

It also shows their lack of knowledge of economic history. The ponzi mania that overtook Albania in the early 90s is a much more chilling and sobering story of how large numbers of people can get sucked into greater fool economic schemes at scale, even to the point where politics, the media, and all of the major corporations in the area get overcome by the mania.

I won't tell the whole story, you can read about it here and elsewhere.

In the mid-1990s, Albania was transitioning into a liberalized market economy after years under a State-controlled economy reinforced by the cult of personality involving longtime Communist leader Enver Hoxha; the rudimentary financial system became dominated by pyramid schemes, and government officials tacitly endorsed a series of pyramid investment funds. Many Albanians, approximately two-thirds of the population, invested in them. In 1997, Albanians, who had lost $1.2 billion, took their protest to the streets where uncontainable rioting and attacks on government infrastructure led to the toppling of the government and the temporary existence of a stateless society. Although technically a Ponzi Scheme, the Albanian scams were commonly referred to as pyramid schemes both popularly and by the International Monetary Fund

I think this is important for Bitcoiners to understand, because although Donald Trump has signalled support for Bitcoin, as has JD Vance, there is almost no evidence that either of them (including their VC backers) make any distinction between bitcoin and crypto, and thus by simply continuing the Biden administration's policy of knee-capping the enforcement of securities law by preventing any distinction being made between unregistered securities and digital commodities the trajectory is not so much favourable for bitcoin but favourable for a crypto bubble that will carry bitcoin's price upward along with many scams. VCs obviously need this bubble to stay solvent given the lack of any foreseeable returns from AI to justify the massive capital allocation, or any of their other big speculative bets (cold fusion, Deep tech, etc...). They need to reignite DeFi, tokenisation, and all that horseshit to rip off all the greater fools who invested in their ICOs once more, but this time with the tailwinds of a friendly regulatory environment.

Of course Bitcoin will come through this oncoming economic catastrophe, but not untarnished, and it might take a long time to shake off the association with calamity and profligacy.

I'm not saying this is going to happen, but someone needs to take a crowbar to Donald Trump and lever out of him an explanation of the distinction between bitcoin and crypto, or at least from Vance. And if not, I would bet on a bumpy road ahead.