merchants really did engage in a frantic tulip trade, and they paid incredibly high prices for some bulbs. And when a number of buyers announced they couldn’t pay the high price previously agreed upon, the market did fall apart and cause a small crisis
The article is more about how many of the anecdotal and narrative myths around it that weren't true.
With bitcoin I know quite a few bitcoin bores, so fun times ahead.
Maybe people don’t talk about it much these days. People in the company I’m with spoke about their experiences working during them. Some got lucky when their financial advisor told them to at least sell their first vesting (their stock would have dropped 80-90% by next sell window), others weren’t so lucky.
Even people who believed in the future of technology and the long term impact of the internet and just invested a portion of their retirement savings in NASDAQ composite index funds watched them take 15 years to recover their value.
After a few years people stop talking about their bad decisions.
That's quite a lot bigger than some merchants in the Netherlands losing their shirts in the tulip crash. It's also a lot bigger than the impact of a bitcoin crash would be if it happened today.