Send flowers, speculate on tulip prices with Bitcoin

The Atlantic’s Robinson Meyer has a funny piece up that notes how it is now possible to exchange Bitcoin for tulips directly online.

For anyone who doesn’t get the joke: In the 1630s, there was a massive speculative bubble around Dutch tulips, since referred to as “tulip mania.” Speculation over a 20-week period in 1636 and 1637 drove the price of tulip bulbs to about ten times what a local craftsman would have earned annually.

The bubble burst in the spring of 1637, and tulips have become synonymous with reckless speculation in the 400 years since. Some people liken Bitcoin to the tulip mania bubble.

The company facilitating the exchange between these two speculative assets is a startup called BloomNation, which allows customers to purchase flowers online directly from local retailers.

Bitcoin-tulips jokes aside, this is a cool company. BloomNation started in 2011 as essentially a UX upgrade to typical online flower buying. You enter the city where you live (US only right now), and you will be shown specific offers from local florists. You can then filter by price, occasion or flower type.

TechCrunch reported last fall that BloomNation raised $1.65 million from Andreessen Horowitz, among others, as the company has positioned itself as the “Etsy of flowers.”

Since then, the company has begun to process Bitcoin payments via Coinbase.

So, for all you Bitcoin enthusiasts who got so wrapped up in last week’s pseudo-Apocolypse that you forgot about Valentine’s Day, here’s your chance to make up for it.