11–20 of 43 posts
>“And in 2019, when you hear people complaining about Bitcoin and warning about it, what you are hearing are the voices of people in 1637 saying: you shouldn’t be involved in this trade. You’re the wrong person, you don’t know enough.” Why would you torpedo a good article at the very end with such a stupid paragraph?
The best reference of the Tulip bubble I heard on business news was a guy saying, "Bitcoin is giving tulips a bad name" Just goes to show how crazy a ride bitcoin has had in historic terms. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/why-bitcoin-is-now-the-big...
If you start counting from the first available public prices ($0.1), it's 200,000 times apreciations. If you start from the price when the first articles about it appeared on HN ($1), it appreciated 20,000 times.
Only this exact analogy is trotted out every time the Bitcoin exchange rate swings up or down very quickly. It's happened about a half dozen times now over the last 10 years.
You see this on the way up and down. The line comes mostly from people don't understand the underlying technology or economics.
Nor do those sage finger-waggers point out that the tulip mania was over within less than one year between 1636 and 1637.
Whatever Bitcoin is, it's not like Tulip Mania, nor is it much like anything that's come before.
This same research was discussed in 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16399756
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16399944
And a part from Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania#Modern_views
"Research into tulip mania since then, especially by proponents of the efficient-market hypothesis,[17] suggests that his story was incomplete and inaccurate."
So there is an actual agenda ("the efficient-market hypothesis" and obviously also the political forces with anti-regulatory ideologies) behind many of the claims that the bubbles aren't anything to worry about, or that some specific even hasn't happened.
In the case of Anne Goldgar's work, claiming that she found only 37 people who paid for a bulb more than "quite good yearly wage" of that time doesn't disprove that many poorer people could have spent less and were actually bankrupt, but that their fate wasn't recorded the way it was for the highest transactions and their initiators. It should not be surprising that the 37 richest people involved (which is obvious because the poorer couldn't have even invested that much) weren't hit too hard with a single speculation.
>“And in 2019, when you hear people complaining about Bitcoin and warning about it, what you are hearing are the voices of people in 1637 saying: you shouldn’t be involved in this trade. You’re the wrong person, you don’t know enough.” Why would you torpedo a good article at the very end with such a stupid paragraph?
>“And in 2019, when you hear people complaining about Bitcoin and warning about it, what you are hearing are the voices of people in 1637 saying: you shouldn’t be involved in this trade. You’re the wrong person, you don’t know enough.” Why would you torpedo a good article at the very end with such a stupid paragraph?
On HN every article about Bitcoin has someone saying "tulips" and another one "beanie babies"
The tulip bubble is the worst poster child of asset bubbles and irrational exuberance But at this point, I don't think it matters. Colloquially, saying 'tulips' gets the point across. People know that you are criticizing the exuberance or volatility of an ephemeral asset. People know what asset price distortion you are comparing it to.
I think the south sea bubble which even caught Isaac Newton out might be the worst.
The South Sea Company is a remarkable example of people ignoring the fundamentals of a stock in order to speculate, though. Or perhaps a story of people knowing just enough about the fundamentals to get themselves into trouble... (Many comparisons were made to the East India Company, which had a similar trade monopoly, and that comparison made some sense - until you consider the fact that a trade monopoly with land your country owns is much more profitable than one where you're frequently at war with the owners)
The tulip bubble is the worst poster child of asset bubbles and irrational exuberance But at this point, I don't think it matters. Colloquially, saying 'tulips' gets the point across. People know that you are criticizing the exuberance or volatility of an ephemeral asset. People know what asset price distortion you are comparing it to.
That was less fascinating than the myth, to me.