Bitcoin vs Tulip Mania: The Critics' Favorite Comparison, Wrong Since 2013

In December 2013, Nout Wellink, the former president of the Dutch central bank, De Nederlandsche Bank, told students at the University of Amsterdam that Bitcoin was worse than the tulip mania. "At least then you got a tulip," he said. "Now you get nothing." Bitcoin had just passed $1,000 for the first time. A Dutch central banker reaching for the most famous Dutch financial disaster was almost inevitable, and it started a habit that the critics of Bitcoin have never broken.

What Happened in 1637

Tulips reached the Dutch Republic from the Ottoman Empire in the late 1500s and became a luxury for wealthy collectors. Rare varieties with streaked, flame-like petals were the most prized. By the winter of 1636 to 1637 people were trading bulbs that were still in the ground, buying and selling promises to deliver a bulb the following summer, much like a futures contract on a stock exchange today. Much of this trade happened in taverns. In early February 1637, at an auction in Haarlem, the buyers did not turn up. Prices collapsed within days, and many of the contracts were never settled.

The popular version of what came next, with ruined merchants, suicides in the canals and a nation brought low, comes mostly from one book: Charles Mackay's "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds", published in 1841, about two hundred years after the event. Mackay gave no references. The historian Anne Goldgar, then at King's College London, spent years in the Dutch archives, mainly in Haarlem, for her 2007 book "Tulipmania: Money, Honor, and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age". She found little evidence of wider economic damage, no suicides and no bankruptcies she could tie to tulips. The few people who lost large sums, she concluded, could mostly afford to. In her account, the drama came from moralising pamphlets written at the time to mock speculators, which later writers repeated as fact.

There was a bubble, and there was a crash. It lasted a few months, involved a small circle of traders, and did not wreck the Dutch economy.

Who Said It

The comparison became a reflex in September 2017. At a Barclays banking conference in New York on 12 September, Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, the largest bank in the United States, called Bitcoin a fraud. "It's worse than tulip bulbs," he said. "It won't end well. Someone is going to get killed." He added that he would fire any JPMorgan trader who traded it. Bitcoin was then about $4,106.

By 9 January 2018 the price had more than tripled to about $14,297, and Dimon told Fox Business that he regretted calling it a fraud. He did not say he regretted the tulips. The same year Bitcoin fell by more than 80% from its peak, and the tulip line came back into fashion. It returned again in 2022, after the collapses of Terra and FTX, when the price fell by roughly three quarters.

Each time, the argument was the same: a thing with no use beyond what the next buyer will pay is a bubble, and bubbles end. And each time, the price later went higher than before. Bitcoin reached about $69,000 in November 2021, passed $100,000 for the first time in December 2024, and set a record of about $126,000 in October 2025.

Where the Comparison Fails, and Where It Does Not

The tulip episode lasted a few months in one country. Bitcoin, launched in January 2009, has been trading for more than 17 years, around the world, every hour of every day. The tulip bulb was a plant that could be bred and multiplied, so supply could always grow. Bitcoin's rules cap the supply at 21 million coins, which is the property its supporters cite first. Since January 2024 it has also been held inside exchange-traded funds run by some of Wall Street's biggest firms, the kind of product tulips never got.

The comparison is not entirely wrong, which is why it survives. Bitcoin has fallen by 70% or more several times, and anyone who bought near a peak and sold near a trough lost most of their money, just as a late tulip buyer did in February 1637. A price driven largely by what the next buyer will pay can fall fast, and Bitcoin's has.

Where the critics went wrong was the ending. Tulip mania was a single bubble that burst and stayed burst. Bitcoin has burst several times and come back each time, which makes it something the tulip comparison cannot describe. The critics also leaned on a version of 1637 that historians have since largely taken apart. In a sense the analogy fits: a frightening story about tulips that turned out to be smaller than it sounded, attached to a warning about Bitcoin that has not come true.