Looks like you vapor-locked on the physical/digital point before you finished reading.

Let's stay with purely digital. There's an app on your phone that you bought for $1, which seemed like a fair deal to you at the time -- you paid $1 for something you thought was worth $1.

The author adds a feature to the app. You like the feature, and now if someone asked you what the app were worth to you, you'd say $2. In effect, a dollar of value just appeared out of thin air. No magic needed so far for this to happen, I hope.

Same situation but you don't care about the feature -- it's something you don't personally use. But now new buyers are more interested in the app, so more people pay $1 for it. Again, some extra wealth got created just by coding up the new feature. Bubble? New paradigm? It's different this time? Nope.

A new feature got added to Bitcoin. The market says it's more valuable now.

It's no different than all the third world countries inventing phantom cash every time they trot out a new currency because the old one suffered astronomical inflation.

All money is funny money. The US government regularly invents phantom cash out of thin air in order to maintain the desired 3% annual inflation. That's hundreds of billions of dollars every year that just poof into existence.

I'm basically with you though, but just out of having not had any need for it yet.

If a need arises, I'll get some just like I had to get 8 different currencies while traveling Europe before the EU. Those leftover bills feel pretty much like funny money to me. There are lots of people who would trade me US currency for them, but I still subjectively value them as basically worthless because ... well it doesn't really matter why (truth is, I'm too lazy/"busy" to go to the bank).

The value of a currency, any currency, (like any other object) is subjective to the holder.

Why do you say "zero share" of the same sales channels? It's literally the exact same audience/"customers" as BTC. 100% share.