When Tulips Were Worth More than Gold

Amy Shira Teitel
8 min readJun 7, 2022

Would you ever spend two hundred and thirty thousand dollars on an NFT? For some people, that’s a maybe. For me, it’s a little baffling. NFTs are, in essence, a case of the perceived value of a product and predicting how the market for that product will behave. People invest, hoping the market will boom, allowing them to profit before interest in that product wanes. It’s a delicate balance of speculation and gambling. And the historian in me can’t help thinking NFTs are a modern incarnation of Tulipmania, the period in the Netherlands in the early 1600s when tulips were more valuable than…

Amy Shira Teitel

Historian and author of Fighting for Space (February 2020) from Grand Central Publishing. Also public speaker, TV personality, and YouTuber. [The Vintage Space]