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Tulip mania: when a single flower was worth more than a house (2025)
- amelius 4mo ago> when a single flower was worth more than a house Yeah but housing prices weren't as crazy as they are now.
- hootz 4mo agoYou know, we also have the tulips of our time...
- dude250711 4mo agoOnce OpenAI/Anthropic IPO, until then it's not a perfect analogy.
- wiseowise 4mo agoI'm all for shitting on hyperscalers, but let's not compare LLMs to tulips/NFTs.
- conartist6 4mo agoWhy 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.
- root-parent 4mo agoThis time is different because we have the earnings...while completely ignoring the return on capital...is nothing more than a CNBC meme...
- KaiserPro 4mo agoSouth sea bubble covers those.
- walthamstow 4mo agoWe've had loads of tulips this century, from beanie babies to NFTs
- graeme 4mo agoI 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, but does anyone have better knowledge of the state of our understanding of the history of tulip prices? Edit: the top comment provided what I had been thinking of. My account above about profits wasn't right, because the trades were never fulfilled. When prices went too high, people didn't honour their contracts and that was that. No one went bankrupt. And as the bulb owners had bought at lower prices they also were fine. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48322546 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48322546 https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/there-never-was-real-tulip-fever-180964915/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/there-never-was-real-...
- shiandow 4mo agoAre you asking because you think the LSAT is at odds with the article's description of the mania? Because it is not.
- somenameforme 4mo agoThe 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 reasonable chance of making a profit, and even if you didn't make a profit then you'd stand an even more reasonable chance of getting out with fairly minimal losses. Nobody thought there was any remotely high chance of a poor quality rendering of an ape being worth more than a house for the indefinite future. It was just speculation, sometimes poorly and sometimes reasonably measured.
- tardedmeme 4mo ago
- Bengalilol 4mo agoFor a wider context, if needed: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_Popular_Delusions_and_the_Madness_of_Crowds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_Popular_Delusion...>
- jpmattia 4mo agoManias, Panics, and Crashes by Charles Kindleberger is a more modern book, which I'd recommend as well.
- 1970-01-01 4mo agoBitcoin circa 2018-2019. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1574985600&dateRange=custom&dateStart=1529625600&page=0&prefix=true&query=tulip%20bitcoin&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1574985600&dateRange=custom&...
- ACV001 4mo agoSimilar articles in the future. "Bitcoin mania: when a single bitcoin was worth more than a house"
- irishcoffee 4mo agoIt 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)
- zulux 4mo agoConvert it to drugs. With the right combination, you can talk to Mr. Bitcoin.
- tempoponet 4mo ago- 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.
- irishcoffee 4mo ago> - 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.
- 4mo ago
- silotis 4mo agoThe 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-tulip-fever-180964915/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/there-never-was-real-...
- namdnay 4mo agoReally interesting article, thanks!
- roenxi 4mo agoIt 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. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania
- Hilliard_Ohiooo 4mo agoSo 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 which it was not.
- cucumber3732842 4mo ago>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 which it was not. The fact that it's marketed as a story about psychology and mania rather than government policy gone awry is arguably itself a story about psychology and mania. People have a need to feel like the forces that control them know what they're doing.
- baobabKoodaa 4mo agoSubject is very interesting but this article does a poor job exploring it
- ck2 4mo agoah there's a good term so "AI" mania ("AI" derangement syndrome?) when ram and storage starts to cost as much as rent or a car eventually now we just wait for the bubble collapse and lots of cheap hardware even if slightly used
- PunchyHamster 4mo agosadly the AI it produces despise the overhype is still way more useful than tulips. I don't think bubble burst would get us to RAM prices pre-boom for a while
- hodder 4mo agoWe do this now with something even less intrinsically valuable than tulips: BTC. It all just comes down to supply and demand.
- rvz 4mo agoNow 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.
- andsoitis 4mo ago> 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?
- rvz 4mo agoMany 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.
- iambateman 4mo agoMaybe we should update our lexicon to "NFT mania" –– far more people lost money in that phenomenon.
- brap 4mo agoAt 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.
- root-parent 4mo ago>> All you “own” is an entry on some ledger, which doesn’t inherently give you ownership over anything else. No different from bitcoin...
- hodder 4mo agoExact 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.
- brap 4mo agoNot 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.
- deleted 4mo ago
- throw0101c 4mo agoWhen 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-bust 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_dr_william_quinn_coauthor_of_boom_and_bust_a/ https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/i2wfsm/i_am_... * Book talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLl3Ijb01I0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLl3Ijb01I0 Garber does have it though, along with Mississippi and South Sea: * https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262571531/famous-first-bubbles/ https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262571531/famous-first-bubbles/ See also perhaps Perez's book on tech hype and bubbles (starting with Canalmania): * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_Revolutions_and_Financial_Capital https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_Revolutions_and_...
- pedrocr 4mo agoIn the AMA you link they say the tulip mania was probably a bubble just not a major one that impacted the economy meaningfully.
- phaser 4mo agoI didn't learn anything about tulips, markets, or the tulip market in this article.
- root-parent 4mo agoIf you want to learn about crowd insanity read Nietzsche, if you want to learn about bubbles read about 1998 to 2001 and the current AI bubble. Both were and will be worst than 1929.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- renegade-otter 4mo agoPerhaps beanie babies is an example that we actually know about.
- TheOtherHobbes 4mo agoI wonder if there are more recent examples?
- dalben 4mo agoNFTs
- renegade-otter 4mo agoI think NFTs were this niche thing only crypto people were dealing. It was not a wide cultural phenomenon. I bet the majority of the population don't know what it is.
- some_random 4mo agoI'm not sure if I'd call it culture wide, but a significant number of non-tech people in my life were not just aware of it but actively considering "investing".
- ocdtrekkie 4mo agoLabubu was last year: https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/21/us/labubu-doll-plushie-pop-mart-dg 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-expensive-labubu-on-ebay/ https://nypost.com/2025/08/02/us-news/this-is-the-most-expen... It burnt out much faster than Beanie Babies did.
- renegade-otter 4mo agoEverything has faster cycles. Also, Labubu is ugly. It's a bad knockoff of the Soviet character Cheburashka.
- expedition32 4mo agoIt's funny to me as a Dutch citizen that all of our cultural heritage comes from abroad. Even cheese was apparently invented on the Asian steppes.
- ian_holt 4mo agoI 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)
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- GeoAtreides 4mo agoFor the tulip mania, as well as other manias, I very strongly recommend: "Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds" by Charles Mackay[1] Very informative and a very enjoyable read. [1] https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/24518 https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/24518
- block_dagger 4mo agoCame in to Ctrl-F for "Bitcoin" - 9 matches so far.
- peacefulnerd 4mo ago1 gram of legal marijuana in Colorado is $1.25. In third world countries it's a few cents outdoors. Partially legal (no import/export between states and countries) and illegal drugs bankrupt people because of prohibition inflation.
- tim-tday 4mo agoNot a single tulip. The bulb. The best new tulip line from which the latest product in a hot market could emerge. What would it be worth to have the production capability for and exclusive sales rights for the latest iPhone?