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RE: Is Bitcoin A (Tulip) Bubble? History's Most Exaggerated Non-Bubble (Even Tulip's Weren't Tulips)
That's a good overview. I would also add that back then people were very much poorer, which means, there was a lot less capital floating around. On the height of the mania one top tulip cost around 30k Gulden (->Wiki) while the average annual income was 150 Gulden.
Compared to the global average annual income of about 10k $ that would mean a price of 2 million $ for one Bitcoin. That's hardly possible, since the overall market cap would be at 40 trillion $. It would literally eat away all the capital in the world. I'd say the breaking point for the global economy (= an uncontrolled contraction) would be reached at maybe a quarter of that price.
"On the height of the mania one top tulip cost around 30k Gulden"
This is precisely the misinformation I literally wrote this article to dispel:
"The "trade" marking the top of the bubble, the one everyone uses to calculate the total bubble percentage? Never happened."
Your market cap numbers explain why this number was always such patent nonsense.
I got that number straight from the German Wiki article about the Tulipmania:
translate
Although these specific tulips never made it over the counter, it is enough for a rough estimate of the entire mess, as I think. Even if the "stable" peak price was just 10,000 Gulden, the market "futures" were pointing upwards, not to mention that this price still would be equal to far more than half a million Dollar.
My whole point here is that the entire Tulip situation was over-stated.
Wikipedia is not an acceptable sole-source when specifically discussing matters accused of being incorrectly hyped up in history. It will have exactly the same faults. You need more primary sources. Preferably, not Dutch Calvinists.
"there was an offer"
You can't price markets by offers. Offers are not a trade. Hell, you shouldn't even price them by a single trade.
"“There weren’t that many people involved and the economic repercussions were pretty minor,” Goldgar says."
...
"So if tulipmania wasn’t actually a calamity, why was it made out to be one? We have tetchy Christian moralists to blame for that. With great wealth comes great social anxiety, or as historian Simon Schama writes in The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age, “The prodigious quality of their success went to their heads, but it also made them a bit queasy.” All the outlandish stories of economic ruin, of an innocent sailor thrown in prison for eating a tulip bulb, of chimney sweeps wading into the market in hopes of striking it rich—those come from propaganda pamphlets published by Dutch Calvinists worried that the tulip-propelled consumerism boom would lead to societal decay. Their insistence that such great wealth was ungodly has even stayed with us to this day."
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/there-never-was-real-tulip-fever-180964915/
I don't know if I should trust such an US-imperialist free-market propaganda institution like the Smithsonian;-)
Ah, well, you may have a point there. I mostly just use them for the minerals section of the Natural History Museum. Perhaps they are a biased source as well.
It's probably both relatively true.
Looking at the size of the bubble compared to the general wealth and economic situation it must have been huge, especially since it was a new mass phenomenon. But then again, one must never forget that money is switching hands despite the price break-down and while one half loses everything, the other wins everything.
Economics is all about capital flow and trust and the repercussions of such a bursting bubble are the more severe, the less the winners of the burst trust the economy, because they hold their capital back from changing hands. If - and I guess this was the case in the Netherlands - the trust is high and the winners of the situation have confidence into the future, they simply reinvest the money they've just won in the bubble lottery. Then, the economic consequences are maybe visible, but limited.
My guess would be that the tulips have been traded between professionals who didn't take their gains and ran, but acted professionally and reinvested. I would say that if it had been a market driven by amateurs, it might have ended with more damage.
Ultimately, much like the current market cap of cryptocurrencies, the "market cap" of tulips was probably grossly overexaggerated by ignoring the effects of the order book vs. peak price:
https://steemit.com/taxes/@lexiconical/valuing-steem-rewards-as-taxable-income-is-a-vast-overstatement-of-tax-liability-part-2-the-thin-order-book-and-flash-crashes