We do this now with something even less intrinsically valuable than tulips: BTC.
It all just comes down to supply and demand.
Tulip mania: when a single flower was worth more than a house (2025)
31–40 of 135 posts
Re: Tulip mania: when a single flower was worth more than a house (2025)
#32Now we have startups that have 0 revenue, 0 product and 0 cash flow now somehow being worth over a billion which is more than mansions.
Re: Tulip mania: when a single flower was worth more than a house (2025)
#33Maybe we should update our lexicon to "NFT mania" –– far more people lost money in that phenomenon.
Re: Tulip mania: when a single flower was worth more than a house (2025)
#34Re: Tulip mania: when a single flower was worth more than a house (2025)
#35I teach the LSAT and one of the passages is famously about this mania and contends that it was actually rational. You paid a high price for a tulip bulb, planted it, and then sold the descendants which paid off the original price. The narrative from this article seems to be largely based on Thackeray's book from 1841. Wikipedia suggests the LSAT passage is modern scholarly received wisdom at least in some quarters, b…
According to Copilot you can get one or two offspring per year from a tulip. So if you spent the price of a really nice house on one of those, it will take you quite some time to multiply the price down into reasonable territory. And even if you stay in unreasonable price territory, an average home, it is one thing to find a buyer for one tulip at that price, it is a very different thing to find a bunch of them. And you are still looking at three, four, five years of tulip growing to get the price down to a tenth of what you paid.
Re: Tulip mania: when a single flower was worth more than a house (2025)
#36Now we have startups that have 0 revenue, 0 product and 0 cash flow now somehow being worth over a billion which is more than mansions.
> we have startups that have 0 revenue, 0 product and 0 cash flow now somehow being worth over a billion
What is one such example?
Re: Tulip mania: when a single flower was worth more than a house (2025)
#37Maybe we should update our lexicon to "NFT mania" –– far more people lost money in that phenomenon.
At least in the tulip case, they actually had some minor value. You owned a pretty flower. You could also make the case for crypto money, I guess.
Any person with common sense and basic technical understanding could tell you NFTs were an incredibly dumb and useless idea from the very start. All you “own” is an entry on some ledger, which doesn’t inherently give you ownership over anything else.
Re: Tulip mania: when a single flower was worth more than a house (2025)
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
The article suggests people genuinely believed a tulip was, implicitly for the foreseeable future, worth more than e.g. a house. That suggests it was some sort of mania over rationality. The NFT thing is comparable. I think most of everybody investing understood that they were worthless and that it was a bubble, but there was a remote chance that it wasn't a bubble and even if it was a bubble then you'd still a reaso…
People in the bubble typically know they are in the bubble. They do not know when to get out. The "even if you didn't make a profit then you'd stand an even more reasonable chance of getting out with fairly minimal losses" is the thing people are wrong about - once bubble is popping, only fastest few can react fast enough.
Is this true though? Take NFTs for again the latest contemporary example - that bubble has obviously long since popped, but those ape NFTs still trade for ~$20k with daily volume in the hundreds of thousands, and a lot of people made a lot of money off it all, some probably still are. At their peak they sold for millions of dollars, but that's on the extreme fringe end. Most traders literally can't afford the heights of bubbles, or anywhere near them, which largely limits the breadth of massive losses.
And we're speaking of modern times where there is this one grand unified global marketplace - the internet, that is most conducive to an inescapably rapid boom-bust. In tulip times there would have been a vast number of relatively decentralized marketplaces with varying supply and demand levels, for a good amount of time after the bubble popped.
Re: Tulip mania: when a single flower was worth more than a house (2025)
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Once OpenAI/Anthropic IPO, until then it's not a perfect analogy.
I'm all for shitting on hyperscalers, but let's not compare LLMs to tulips/NFTs.
Why not? After all tulips are quite pleasant when the message about them isn't "HODL." You could hardly claim they have no value, only that their perceived value had come to be dominated by groupthink.
Sure sounds like LLMs to me. A fine technology. It exists. Like tulips, it will exist for quite a while to come. So maybe people could stop "betting on it" like it's a polymarket prediction on the second coming of Christ, eh? LLMs, like Christ and Tulips, do not require you to bet on them.
Re: Tulip mania: when a single flower was worth more than a house (2025)
#40The brief mention that the fallout wasn't as disastrous as myth would have it greatly understates just how exaggerated the popular account of tulip mania is. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/there-never-was-real-...
It is also worth pointing out how patchy the price data seems to be. Looking at Wikipedia [0] it seems like there isn't much actual evidence and the exciting part of the bubble was 6 months.
I expect the people involved cared a lot, but it looks like more of a cool curio than an event that could have had serious fallout. Paying $200k for a tulip looks quite tame compared to Blue Poles.