points by bloppe 1 day ago | 0 comments
Tulips kinda did go away
[–] eigenspace 1 day ago
There's a beautiful tulip garden just down the street from me, and an outdoor weekly market where tulip bulbs are sold. Tulips are very much still around, I assure you.
[–] bloppe 1 day ago
I don't mean went extinct. I mean the idea that tulips could be an asset class is now laughable, which is not true of the other two. The impact of the tulip industry on GDP is utterly imperceptible.
[–] owebmaster 1 day ago
Same thing could happen with the idea of selling tokens
[–] bloppe 12 hours ago
Ya, or any other asset class
[–] lnkdinsuxs 1 day ago
I think bloppe was talking about the Tulip hype cycle that took out many generations.
[–] eigenspace 1 day ago
Yes, that's my entire point. There was also a railroad hype cycle and an internet hype cycle that took in massive amounts of overinvestment, and all three things remained as regular things in the economy with bigger or smaller roles after the hype cycles ended.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_Mania and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pets.com for some info on the other hype cycles I mentioned.
[–] lnkdinsuxs 1 day ago
[–] wolfinterval 11 hours ago
It seems like much of the tulip mania has become the stuff of legend.
From what I have read, it seems closer to baseball card trading than AI or dot com.
You can find baseball and pokemon cards trading for thousands of dollars right now on ebay.
This would seem insane to a culture just valueing the cards as pieces of cardboard.
It would be like hundred of years from now people viewing our society as wanting to buy Mickey Mantle cards instead of houses. It is a very small number of people involved with this. It is not a widespread movement to hold your retirement money in Mickey Mantle cards.
In an interesting way it shows even better though he we are susceptible to these type of mythologies. People don't even question the absurd givens of the narratives of the tulip mania. We just repeat these narratives to each other as if they are historic fact.