Albanian Banks Shun Bitcoin, Except One – Trustnodes

The beautiful riviera of Albania, decorated this August with an almost tropical, albeit brief, rain sunshine, adds to the reminisces of any expat by reminding cryptonians of almost a decade ago.

That was a time when bitcoin felt very underground, shunned by banks which with glee closed the bank accounts of early pioneers that were brave enough to navigate more treacherous waters than the Greek islands of ancient times.

That 2013 is the present in Albania, where the desire to move forward as the newly inaugurated EU negotiating state with a crisp European flag in front of the Prime Ministry, collides with the reality that time moves in waves across the globe.

Information in our day and age is not instant, at least not the actionable sort. Information instead still takes a week to a month to travel, and in matters of innovation, even a decade.

You received two transfers from bitcoin, we can not accept them, said a person from the Banka Kombetare Tregtare (BKT), which translates to, ironically, the Bank of Commerce with it in practice being more the ‘workers’ bank and the biggest in Albania.

Oblivious to what she was further stating, it’s political, she added, virtual money. It’s our policy, so the transfers are refused.

There couldn’t be another response than what Americans and Europeans, up and down across the Atlantic, gave a decade ago: well then, I’ll change my bank.

Thankfully others had travelled this road before, and a quick search gave the unanimous response: Tirana Bank. So, information does also travel instantly in our day and age.

For those four million tourists that have visited the Mediterranean country this year so far, thus, if you plan to bitcoin in Albania and need to open a bank account, Tirana Bank shouldn’t give you any problems. Some say Union Bank as well, and Credins Bank, though the latter two have not been verified.

Forgotten Times

It is of course preposterous nowadays for any American, British, or European bank, to deny bitcoin related transactions. Although some banks like Barclays, which always had an anti-crypto streak, keeps flagging crypto related transactions as ‘suspicious,’ adding delays and inconveniences for no apparent good reason.

The Supreme Court of India has further added a precedent whereby, unless parliament declares cryptos to be illegal, it is disproportionate and unconstitutional for a commercial, or even central bank, to deny crypto transactions.

That’s one of the biggest battle won in this space, if not the biggest, socially speaking. This bull run of 2021, therefore, has previously been declared by these pages to be the adoption wave of the developing world.

We were partially wrong in placing them in 2017. If the example of Albania, which can be placed in its own category of smaller developing nations, is any indication, much of the world beyond US and EU is actually in 2013 or even further behind.

The court battle for India should have made that clear. Turkey’s declaration that bitcoin can not be used for payments adds to that 2013 feeling of the underground breaking the currents. Nigeria tried to go so far as declare cryptos illegal completely.

Brazil however, at a government level, comes across as today’s London 2014. Though no chancellor there has bought BTC as George Osborn did, they appear to be this wave’s counter-trend.

The Currents

From a tiny country like Albania, where the grand games, power struggles, and battles of the great powers are a spectation, the leet pretenses of guild-ish banks come across as a contradictory peculiarity where they’re both irrelevant and all powerful in their local.

As always of course someone breaks rank as this is a general revolution, a generational revolution. The Economist conceded as much when it had the pipper ‘stealing’ the youth in one of their World In Year (2017?) cover.

And therefore those battles were long won in London, in Washington, in Paris, and in Berlin. But they curiously repeat, and almost to the dot, in every nation.

Some have it worse than others. The battle for China was lost, though the underground there is extremely strong. But, for a tiny nation like Albania, the peculiarity goes beyond the usual precisely due to its irrelevance, and complete relevance to those living there.

The market cap of cryptos reached $3 trillion. That’s about 200x Albania’s GDP of circa $16 billion. Just 1% of the crypto market is more than enough to triple Albania’s GDP. You’d expect thus the Bank of Commerce to leap in joy at such leet customers at the very frontiers, just as the UK Treasury did when these pages called it in 2014.

But the fear of the unknown, of the new, and most crucially the un-awareness of changing times, perhaps finds it easier to prevail.

Worth it to say at a government level, Albania is neutral to friendly at best. The Prime Minister of Albania, painter Edi Rama, appears far more likely to even embrace cryptos than go any foolish way.

That’s especially in a country where they don’t even have a stock exchange. Not necessarily due to the lack of companies that could trade publicly. There’s the Balfin Group, which owns Tirana Bank. There’s many others, ranging from raw resources to infrastructure like ports, to the media, to services, and all else in between.

It isn’t actually clear why they don’t have a stock exchange, except this was a communist country 30 years ago. They might just not have the skills, or again the awareness that such sophistication in publicly traded companies would be useful.

A new exchange for this EU negotiating country, that might be a full on member within half a decade, would allow for the employment of the very latest technology, and perhaps even the merger of new finance with the old.

The lack of sophistication therefore may well allow for the opportunity to leapfrog, with Tirana having the potential to be a regional hub, especially as it may attracted many skilled men and women from the diaspora.

Yet for now new finance is more at the surface underground, with the very good news being that some local banks clearly appear to be very forward looking, and that speaks well to future developments that probably will follow the same path as in western Europe and USA.

This story is probably repeating right now across the globe, from Baku to Lagos, whatever the Vietnam capital is from Hanoi to erm Bogotá in Colombia.

Of course, negative forces may prevail in some of these places, but in most it is probably the same where banks are generally hostile except one or two that embrace the frontier.

The same line of growth presumably should be expected in all of them as they find relevant use cases, especially in international commerce and in joining the global web economy.

Placing global crypto adoption, averaged out between rich and middle nations, at 2017 and now during bear maybe at 2018.

It is probably too soon however to say whether this middle class of nations will drive crypto growth in the future as adoption in USA and much of Europe still has some way to go.

But it probably can be said that this silent and largely unnoticed middle is becoming part of the crypto story, and that may leave its mark as crypto access is global and its barriers are merely skill based, namely learn Solidity.