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https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/there-never-was-real-...
The closest thing to an involved government wasn't really in favour of trading in immaterial goods at all. Something close to government intervention did happen in one of the two involved government systems after the bubble popped, but it was effectively unratified and useless (the local equivalent of a supreme court even ruled that the government couldn't interfere with the tulip trade).
The entire thing was just a club of a few hundred relatively rich people throwing themselves at a bubble. Most people didn't have the means or money to participate.
The "mania" name is an insult to those who partook as much as it described the trade bubble. It's not related to the modern psychological definition of "mania" that came much later.
I don't think a city of more than 100,000 would be possible without a substantial amount of civil management.
Deciding with bits are for streets and which bits are for buildings needs an arbiter of som sort for starters.
If a place had a sewer it probably had a government.
Sometimes I like to recall that somewhere in Tenochtitlan there must have been some Aztec administrator doing a job like making sure the road signs are repainted every few years.
In Ireland, for as long as it has existed with its own government, the two have been pretty heavily intertwined.
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.
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".
No. It’s a story that has been repeated with beanie babies, baseball cards, and crypto crap
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
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.
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.
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.
That actually seems like a very big difference.
(If you were being sarcastic, I apologize for not reading it right)
No different from bitcoin...
I own several NFTs that are important to me, and they're worth every penny I paid. I never had any illusions that I owned anything other than a historical footnote; I think that this sort of ownership is meaningful and important.
It's much more realistic to me than "buying a song" from one of the corporate music distributors. "Owning" a song seems to be much more of a misunderstanding of how data works in a digital world than owning an entry in a ledger.
The problem with the NFTs is that you don't actually own the art they represent and have zero copyright claim to them. In the absolute very best of cases, if you squint hard enough, you could see them as roughly equivalent to the signature of the original creator of the work of art and you're effectively buying a signed digital print of the work. In the worst and more common cases, you're buying nothing at all except a hash on a blockchain.
https://www.coingecko.com/en/nft/bored-ape-yacht-club
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.
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://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/there-never-was-real-...
Anything self-replicating can't hold to "current price best predicts future price".
Hunt brothers buy a bunch of silver, lots on margin (bank borrowed), government saw what was happening and literally changed the rules of the market to force them to mass liquidate when they couldn't meet a margin call (all of the sudden). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Thursday
Selling tulips is a fine business. Selling tulips at an insanely high price by promising that the market for tulips will keep on expanding and increasing the price of tulips is a pyramid scheme. (Well, maybe not quite a pyramid scheme, the structure isn't right. But it certainly wasn't a sustainable business model.)
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.
Isn’t that what all the biggest bagholders thought?
How else do you explain anyone still holding a worthless NFT they spent thousands on?
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.
there was a supply crunch with the manufacturer in China, it was rational to think it wouldn't be solved, creating a limited supply item that had more demand than the supply. the founder solved the issue and flooded the market with beanie babies, prices crashed at that point
It was 100% to do with Ty corp's very clever handling of distribution, limiting where, who and how many Beanies could be sold.
There was a huge over-supply of the less rare Beanies and a huge under-production of the rarer ones. All done on purpose.
* 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 it though, along with Mississippi and South Sea:
* 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_...
Yeah but housing prices weren't as crazy as they are now.
Very informative and a very enjoyable read.
[1] https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/24518
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
It all just comes down to supply and demand.
What is one such example?
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.
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)
- 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.
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.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1574985600&dateRange=custom&...