Dear Tulip Alarmist, get a new argument…

Stop comparing a technology utility to a flower.

I greatly appreciate dissenting viewpoints and actively seek to surround myself with people who have them, especially in the crypto space. But some people just need to step their game up. If the tulip mania is the best argument someone has against crypto’s well-being, all it demonstrates is the fear they have of something they don’t understand, haven’t researched, and/or the possibility that it poses a threat to their current business. Let’s breakdown the comparison here followed by a thought experiment that shows where Dutch Golden Age tulips would sit in the broader crypto ecosystem if they were digitized on an ERC-721 protocol (“CryptoTulips”).

While I plead guilty to the high degree of irreverence in these comparisons, it’s only fitting to meet like with like for such an ill-fitting analogy in the first place. And if the above doesn’t illustrate the clear mismatch, let’s propose a theoretical project called “CryptoTulips” (Someone should actually make these — looking at you Dogecoin). Given the properties of what a tulip actually is, it would fit under the umbrella of “tokenized real assets” on a ERC-721 protocol under another subset of non-fungible tokens such as the popular CryptoKitties, Decentraland (virtual real estate), and CryptoCarz to name a few. As evidenced below, this represents a small fraction of the broader ecosystem of blockchain utilities further demonstrating the absurdity of the comparison in the first place.

Original Chart Sourced from FinForge

All farce aside, is there price speculation in crypto? Absolutely. Could the period between mid-November 2017 and mid-January 2018 be defined as a mania similar to that of the price of tulips? Probably. Was a lot of this mania fueled by clever marketing opportunists, scammers, and their corresponding fools in an unregulated market? Yes. But by no means does it justify the comparison between the enduring utility of blockchain and the aesthetic value of a perishable flower. A similar train of logic could be applied to the subset of people who warn of the “dot-com bubble” and its subsequent fallout. Take a step back and look at the big picture. You know what ended up ultimately coming out of the dot-com bubble? The entire internet as we know it today with every website imaginable serving a large percentage of our daily needs. But I digress, go ahead and keep sounding the alarm bells while relevance starts to pass you by; crypto is here to stay…