I'm going to go out on a limb here and try to break this discussion down into two elements:

- A BMX tire replacing a "touring" tire on a folding bike (which, obviously, is not a BMX.)
- The "Schwalbe > Everything Else" (clearly advocated by Abu Mahendra.)

We get that the folding bike community is a very small niche compared to the BMX community. Historically, the earliest folding bikes and junior cruisers may have standardized the 20" tire/wheel size, but it was the advent - and subsequent explosion - of the BMX genre of riding (there's something awful about the word "Cycling!" Help me out here!) that popularized it. The later growth in interest and popularity of folding bikes in crowded, cramped urban environments - powered, to an extent, by the success of Dahon as a purpose-specific mass producer - had to follow the lead of the much larger, and much more influential, BMX community when it came to tire choices.

Hence the underlying point of this thread. In my OP, I was asking whether I could go wrong fitting a pair of Tioga Fastrs - a purpose-built BMX tire - on my Speed - a steel folding bike with somewhat aggressive geometry. The main clincher (no pun intended) for this Tioga is that it comes in the same size as the factory Marathon Supreme, the somewhat rare 20x1.60. Abu Mahendra strongly argued against it, but I'm still not sure what his argument against the Tioga was based upon: because it's a BMX-specific tire, or because it's not a Schwalbe. That's for him to elaborate on.

Which brings me on to the bigger question: are BMX-focused tires necessarily - or perhaps inherently, if you will - unsuitable for A-to-B/recreational folding bikes?

My other folding bike, a Vybe D7, probably would say no. In fact, the whole reason I bought that one, with its factory 20x2.10 Kenda Kraniums, was because it had a certain BMX-like feel to it that took me back 30 years. A little egregious, given that I would've been perfectly fine with the Speed D8 alone, but there you go.

As for the other part of the discussion - Schwalbe trumps (again, no pun intended) everything else - let me ask this: Is the aforementioned Tioga so drastically inferior to the Supreme that you wouldn't put it on a non-BMX bike to save your life? Let's say you're a hundred miles from home on your folding bike and you lost a tire for whatever reason, and the bike shop you walked over to just had this Tioga in stock. Would you mount it and pedal back home like you had intended when you left, or would you just fold the bike and hitch a ride home because the Tioga sucks just that much?