The problem here is I don't think anyone knows what "real values" are for most of these ICOs yet. Tulips were a more proven entity.
There's also an interesting argument to be made that Tulip mania was rational, because the speculation was done in derivatives contracts which had a clause allowing the holder to pay a very small fee and not take delivery, ie just tear up the contract. Thus, the risk reward of the increasing value vs. the small fee to cancel the contract made tulip mania rational. It depends on how much you believe the financial records of the day.
Its the same as todays exchanges with forex and commodities, when I buy for 100K usd of silver I only need to put 5K down.
Right, buying on margin. I think these tulip contracts were allegedly more like call options with particularly low cost basis. There's an economist who wrote a paper on it, if you feel like googling.
Its kind of the same with cryptos. Look at ethereum, dropped from 360 usd to 13 usd because the guys from status ICO dumped 96K eth on the market all at once. The market cap is an illusion, a small dump can destroy the whole ecosystem.
Yeah, which illustrates how silly some of the taxation is - you can't just multiply stock by price. As you noted, the market cap is way, way smaller than the numbers claim.
Yes absolutely, a few billions dumped on the market would be enough to crash the price by 90%, the 110 billion market is an illusion, there is no more than 5 or 6 billion usd of real money to be cashed out, maybe even less than that.