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Tulip mania: when a single flower was worth more than a house (2025)

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Re: Tulip mania: when a single flower was worth more than a house (2025)

#111

Post by brap »

hodder wrote: post #46
brap wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Exact same argument for crypto though. It is all just supply demand. BTC has much more demand currently and likely more sustainably. Alt coins are just less popular. It is all just supply vs demand.

Not really though, in crypto the thing you own is the ledger entry, the record that says you hold N BTC. You own it because you hold the keys, and only the keys can change it. The token isn't a pointer to some asset sitting elsewhere, the on-chain entry is the asset.

NFTs use the same machinery but the premise is that you own something else, e.g. an image (or real estate!) but nothing on-chain actually grants that ownership. To the extent real ownership exists at all, it lives entirely off-chain, e.g. in a legal contract (that would hold with or without the blockchain).

I am not a fan of crypto either way but NFTs are just ridiculous.

Re: Tulip mania: when a single flower was worth more than a house (2025)

#112

Post by bigbadfeline »

asveikau wrote: post #90
Hilliard_Ohiooo wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So many of these articles get it completely wrong. Economically. People weren't going crazy for tulips just because, the government had incentivized investment in tulips. The government at the time basically told people that they could not lose money on investing tulips. It should be a story about governments misallocating resources. That's it, but people quit. Keep twisting it into a story of psychology and mania wh…

From the article in the comment above, it seems like lack of government involvement is a factor. The article says the courts were unwilling to settle purchase contract disputes. Sounds like a government that is not performing what we today consider a core function, or even libertarians tend to agree civil court is an important function.

> or even libertarians tend to agree civil court is an important function.

Libertarians cannot agree on anything between themselves, they are programmed to hate the government, the hate for each other and humanity as a whole is just a natural consequence of that.

> From the article in the comment above, it seems like lack of government involvement is a factor.

We now have a government that is unwilling to control market excess because the government and big business have merged into one. Actually, the government has resigned from that "core function".

Re: Tulip mania: when a single flower was worth more than a house (2025)

#113

Post by mothballed »

Lerc wrote: post #105
mothballed wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not claiming there is literally no government, I'm claiming they are not acting in planning or maintenance ('civil management') capacity. If you have an easement contract to travel on a 'street' and someone violates it by building a house on it you can still sue them but the government has nothing to do with planning that. The population is not quite 100k but also not an order of magnitude lower either.

But you don't have to pay them even if you lose the suit. No police. If they try to take by force you can defend your property and your life.

Yeah this has happened, where someone went into the easement. Though with fences instead of houses. People just drive around. Realistically no one has decided to die over a fence or house being in the way and no one has decided to die over blocking a car from going around. It's one of those thought exercises that sounds interesting but isn't actually an issue.

Now I suppose at this point you'll move on to the next goal posts. We've been deregulated for 20+ years and we got this long list of gotchas by the statists when we did it but none of the hysterical hypothetical happened and largely because anyone capable of feeding themselves soon realizes acting in extreme bad faith in a place without police is worse for them than it is the people around them. You can add all the 'but but' whatubaut this and that but it simply isn't any more a problem than the fact we also haven't installed anti-aircraft lasers in case aliens arrive.

Re: Tulip mania: when a single flower was worth more than a house (2025)

#114

Post by brap »

vmg12 wrote: post #80
hsartoris wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Using your reasoning Clearly not, the point being made was that you owned a thing, e.g. a Pokemon card. To own an NFT is to, bafflingly, claim to hold a token of ownership of some asset represented by the NFT - where that representation is indicated by the NFT immutably containing, typically, a thoroughly mutable Google Drive link to a picture. The whole thing was always farcical. Again, at least you actually own t…

The value of pokemon cards or birkin bags is not because they are physically owned. This should be obvious from the fact that I could cheaply reproduce them and my identical reproductions would have 0 value compared to the original. I still own them though so again, according to your reasoning they should have the same value. Some pokemon cards are worth so much i could reproduce them with gold instead of cardboard a…

Things can have value beyond their physical substance. A Pokemon card isn't just paper and ink. I'm not arguing about whether the asset has value, I'm arguing about whether you actually own it.

Re: Tulip mania: when a single flower was worth more than a house (2025)

#115

Post by scyclow »

arealaccount wrote: post #110
JohnMakin wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not an NFT guy, but the "Ape Floor" (Cheapest price for a Bored Ape NFT) has remained remarkably stable (priced by ETH) since the craze died down, which has always surprised me: https://www.coingecko.com/en/nft/bored-ape-yacht-club

I could be wrong but Id expect eth and nfts to have similar fluctuations, so this wouldn’t be surprising at all. What about compared to USD or another investment like spy

It does fluctuate, but the floor price is still miraculously $16k

Re: Tulip mania: when a single flower was worth more than a house (2025)

#117

Post by ocdtrekkie »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #52
renegade-otter wrote: post #50

Perhaps beanie babies is an example that we actually know about.

I wonder if there are more recent examples?

Labubu was last year:

https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/21/us/labubu-doll-plushie-pop-ma...

https://nypost.com/2025/08/02/us-news/this-is-the-most-expen...

It burnt out much faster than Beanie Babies did.

Re: Tulip mania: when a single flower was worth more than a house (2025)

#118

Post by amanaplanacanal »

mothballed wrote: post #103
soperj wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really want to know where this is.

~Most of rural AZ and probably rural AK is like this. There are some 'cities' that never incorporated and have street grids without any sort of government administering them nor any organized system of maintenance.

Interesting. I wonder how large a population that could support?

Similar to socialism, which works just fine in a family, or hunter gatherer tribe, but starts running into problems at large scale.

Re: Tulip mania: when a single flower was worth more than a house (2025)

#119

Post by Lerc »

mothballed wrote: post #113
Lerc wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you don't have to pay them even if you lose the suit. No police. If they try to take by force you can defend your property and your life.

Yeah this has happened, where someone went into the easement. Though with fences instead of houses. People just drive around. Realistically no one has decided to die over a fence or house being in the way and no one has decided to die over blocking a car from going around. It's one of those thought exercises that sounds interesting but isn't actually an issue. Now I suppose at this point you'll move on to the next go…

What an odd tangent.

Perhaps if you named the place I would be more able to assess information.

I have little to go on, when you say privately owned? By whom?

Is the ungoverned nature recognised by the country within which it resides?

Re: Tulip mania: when a single flower was worth more than a house (2025)

#120

Post by irishcoffee »

tempoponet wrote: post #66
irishcoffee wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It feels so much worse to me. You could at least hold a tulip bulb, plant it, look at it, smell it, and it was a real thing. The closest you can get to that with bitcoin would be what? Print out your keypair? Maybe write it down on fancy stationary using fancy calligraphy? (Never do these things)

- You can send any amount of money to anyone in the world very quickly and cheaply, and nobody can stop you. - No government can dilute it or limit its supply. Stuff like that. Maybe that matters to you, maybe not, but BTC was created because that didn't exist. And even if you don't use it, you're living in a world where financial institutions have to live alongside an alternative that does these things, for whatever…

> - You can send any amount of money to anyone in the world very quickly and cheaply, and nobody can stop you.

No, you can send any amount of _bitcoin_ to another address, not money.

The value of BTC was backed by the cost of an 8th of pot on silkroad when it first got going. Now it is backed by the USD, which in turn is backed by the US military and the petrodollar. You're effectively trading in US dollars, and if you fuck up the tax man will be on your ass.

> - No government can dilute it or limit its supply.

Any government can seize bitcoins and effectively destroy them. Dilute, sure, nobody can do that, the number is fixed.

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