The easiest way to refute the tulip argument is simply point out Bitcoins total money stock is fixed at 21 million units, wheras you can plant new tulips at will. (The skill/time required to do this is irrelevant to the point).
Actually, the interesting thing about tulips is that that's not true. I don't mean to single you out here, but this is a demonstration of how most people know jack shit about Tulipomania (even though many of them are perfectly willing to bloviate about it and compare Bitcoin to tulips).
One of the revolutionary things about tulips at that time was that the unique patterns caused by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip-breaking_virus were only partially inherited: after a few generations, the bulbs are too weakened to survive, and the particular pattern disappears permanently, no matter how lovely and beautiful it was.
If you read up on a book about Tulipomania, you'll notice there are no contemporary photos of tulips like Semper Augustus. Because Semper Augustus no longer exists.
So you can 'plant new tulips at will' the same way you can 'paint new Rembrandts at will' ie. slap some paint on a canvas and hope it looks vaguely similar and that's the best you can do, since you can never ever get another real Rembrandt or real Semper Augustus.
If you just want some correctives to the popular mythology of Tulipomania, you can start with _Famous First Bubbles_: quick read which demolishes a lot of the platitudes and simplifications, and covers the virus & other issues.
The point of the tulips argument is being missed. The point of the tulips argument is that everything looks great when the price is still increasing in a bubble. This is true whether you're talking about tulips in Nov 1636 or tech stocks in 1998 or Las Vegas real estate in 2005 or gold in 2012 or possibly Bitcoin today.
That's not the point of the tulip mania comparison. It's more about the extraordinarily quick rise in price, and the (ir)rational choices/decisions that can follow.
