This is an extract thar seems fitting to the topic at hand, from the book Bitcoin Billionaires by Ben Mezrich:
Now that Bitcoin was making headlines and part of the global lexicon, it was no longer being ignored; instead, the laughing part was in full gear and the fighting had begun. Bitcoin was either lampooned as a joke, or lambasted as "dangerous". Skeptics compared it to proverbial bubbles, whether Dutch tulips in the 1600s, the dot-coms of the late 1990s, or the housing market in 2008. But Cameron and his brother didn’t believe any of these analogies applied. Bitcoin wasn’t some perishable flower masquerading as a store of value, or a company whose stock price was out of whack with its economic output, or a highly leveraged second home. Bitcoin was a network, and if there was one thing they understood, it was the power of networks. The more people that bought in, the more valuable it became—Metcalfe’s law, plain and simple. And networks didn’t grow at a slow and steady pace; they experienced viral growth.
The key factor is understanding what Bitcoin and bitcoin are. Bitcoin (capital B) is the network that provides an underlying framework for the development of a whole set of ecosystems that are finance related. As such, this type of network has an immense potential intrinsic value that is not bubble based.
bitcoin (lowercap b) on the other hand is subject to large fluctuations and yes, even speculation before it reaches a more operational stable phase, but it rests upon the Bitcoin network as it’s core tangible asset. That has intrinsic value, and although there is no certainty how long it will roam the earth, nor how it will evolve, it inherently has a large component of trust that id subjacent to any sort of money that around, being that another major asset.
I can’t see a Network nor a Trust component in Dutch tulips …
