I better not show my beautiful, flower-loving wife this article. We already have enough flowers (and I would like to be able to keep our home)
Tulip mania: when a single flower was worth more than a house (2025)
61–70 of 135 posts
Re: Tulip mania: when a single flower was worth more than a house (2025)
#62The 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-...
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…
Does it make sense to talk about "the government" in this age? It probably misguides us more than informs us. I've always felt the perception of government at the time is closer to our perception of the captain of the local football team - at best distant and upholding the honor of the village, at worst a thief with a title - rather than how we view it today. Authority of information lay with the church. Maybe replace by "Persons of wealth in positions of power"?
Re: Tulip mania: when a single flower was worth more than a house (2025)
#63Earlier 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.
Using your reasoning a large number of collectible items should be worthless. What really makes an NFT different from a Pokemon card, a Birkin bag, or even an original Monet? My guess is that the seller has to have some sort of authority and established reputation for these kinds of artificially scarce luxury goods to maintain value.
The big issue with NFT's is that can't use them to flex on people as easily.
Re: Tulip mania: when a single flower was worth more than a house (2025)
#64When Quinn and Turner wrote their book Boom and Bust: A Global History of Financial Bubbles they concluded Tulipmania was not a bubble and so did't include it: * https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/48989633-boom-and-bus... Quinn did an AMA when the book was published (2020): * https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/i2wfsm/i_am_... * Book talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLl3Ijb01I0 Garber does have i…
In the AMA you link they say the tulip mania was probably a bubble just not a major one that impacted the economy meaningfully.
Re: Tulip mania: when a single flower was worth more than a house (2025)
#65[deleted]
Re: Tulip mania: when a single flower was worth more than a house (2025)
#66Similar articles in the future. "Bitcoin mania: when a single bitcoin was worth more than a house"
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 that's worth.
Re: Tulip mania: when a single flower was worth more than a house (2025)
#67Now 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?
Many such prominent examples such as Thinking Machines, SSI and AMI Labs and many others like them.
Of course, the only reason for this 'valuation' is because of the founding team but that is just not enough.
This is still a crystal clear bubble.
Re: Tulip mania: when a single flower was worth more than a house (2025)
#68> when a single flower was worth more than a house
Yeah but housing prices weren't as crazy as they are now.
Re: Tulip mania: when a single flower was worth more than a house (2025)
#69Earlier 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.
Using your reasoning a large number of collectible items should be worthless. What really makes an NFT different from a Pokemon card, a Birkin bag, or even an original Monet? My guess is that the seller has to have some sort of authority and established reputation for these kinds of artificially scarce luxury goods to maintain value.
> 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 the Pokemon card at the end of the day.
Re: Tulip mania: when a single flower was worth more than a house (2025)
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Using your reasoning a large number of collectible items should be worthless. What really makes an NFT different from a Pokemon card, a Birkin bag, or even an original Monet? My guess is that the seller has to have some sort of authority and established reputation for these kinds of artificially scarce luxury goods to maintain value.
The big issue with NFT's is that can't use them to flex on people as easily.
I think that was a big part of it, if you owned an expensive NFT and set it as your profile picture it gave you some cred with certain circles online.