Thread by @Pinboard

I'm glad @smdiehl has been talking about the massive pyramid scheme in post-communist Albania, because it has useful parallels to the present. You had a population distrustful of government, a total regulatory failure, and a sense that "this is too big to be a scam" all at once

https://twitter.com/smdiehl/status/1398575817739939845

The Albanian experience was shocking, but it happened in a context of wildcat privatization across Eastern Europe that accomplished its goal (reanimating a dead economy) but at great human cost, particularly among those on fixed income, and created a class of criminal oligarchs

In Albania, you also had people who were simply completely unfamiliar with the mechanics of investment, or what a naked fraud looked like. In cryptocurrency, the same obfuscatory purpose is served by the real but useless technology running the Rube Goldberg apparatus

All the decentralized money tech is innovation cosplay. It's meant to look like a thing that has repeatedly made people rich—an infant technology that will change the world, the next wave of the computer revolution. This mimicry attracts money, which is then held up as proof