“This is worse than the tulip mania,” a former Dutch central bank president said yesterday about bitcoin. “At least then you got a tulip [at the end], now you get nothing.”

What does speculation like that look in action? The Atlantic investigates. Here are some charts.

As of today, you can buy more than 700 tulips with one bitcoin. That’s a precipitous rise in value—at the beginning of October 2013, you couldn’t even buy 90 tulips with one bitcoin.

And two years ago? A single bitcoin could buy you almost exactly two measly tulips.

Look at that recent spike! Look at the growth just in 2013! It’s ridiculous.

Now: My methods aren’t scientific. In trying to calculate the price of a single tulip stem, I consulted a major floral online retailer, a local florist, and a tulip grower in California. They variously presented the price of a single flower at $1.66, $1.50, and $1.00. I’ve settled here, imprecisely, on the gloriously accurate median of $1.50/tulip.

Talking to those folks, I learned that the Dutch still dominate the modern-day political economy of tulips. Tracy Callahan, the president of Bethesda Florist in Bethesda, Maryland, estimated that 85 percent of tulips on the east coast—85 percent of those $1.50 tulips—are grown in Holland.

American florists work out bulk deals with brokers, he said, who themselves deal with growers whose families have sometimes been in the flower-growing business for centuries. After working out a deal, florists receive weekly or twice weekly shipments of tulips, each usually with 3,600 stems.

Because they’re sold privately in bulk, Callahan was reluctant to reveal the wholesale price of tulips, but said it was “significantly less than $1.50.”

Tulips are also grown in the states, though. The biggest American grower of tulips is Sun Valley Floral Farms, based in California. Bill Prescott, a spokesman for the farms, said that unlike Dutch tulips, which are grown hydroponically, most American tulips tend to be grown in soil.

The price of tulips, Prescott said, also varied strongly by their color. Orange tulips go for a high price before Thanksgiving, for example, but then immediately lose value come Black Friday, when red and white tulips become the hot item. (Which, in turn, lose value after Valentine’s Day, when springy pastels take over.)

Prescott said this posed a real problem for growers. “We’ve been in the position where we have too many orange tulips come December,” he told me. What happens then?

“You either sell it to a bouquet maker who can put it in a holiday bouquet and hide the fact that they’re orange tulips,” Prescott said, or “Trader Joe’s has a sale on orange tulips.”