It sounds to me like OP is calling Bitcoin a Ponzi scheme while sugar coating it.
Price goes up as adoption grows and adoption grows because people see the utility that bitcoin provides and decide they want to have that. Be it reaching financial sovereignty or just treating bitcoin as money (ie. store of value).
If many people wanted to buy another PoW coin instead of Bitcoin, the price of Bitcoin would rise, meaning it would generate more profit, which would make people buy only Bitcoin. Therefore, it is not possible for people to buy another
proof of work coin instead of Bitcoin because this would make Bitcoin's price increase generating more profit, which would prevent competition.
In a normal company, competition forces companies to lower prices. In Bitcoin, the logic is inverse, it raises the price and prevents competition from emerging, which makes proof of work impossible to copy.
That makes no sense.
For starters bitcoin is not a company and nobody is sitting on top setting its price to get people to buy it or not.
Secondly if you buy something else, the price of that other thing would go up! In fact this is how the altcoin market works. People buy altcoins, they get pumped. That all happens regardless of Bitcoin even though the altcoin market is affected by bitcoin price movements.
As for "competition", there has been no competition for Bitcoin simply because nobody was capable of coming up with an
innovation that is interesting enough to change the world like Bitcoin did and get adopted as much as Bitcoin.
So far we've only seen developers who were more interested in making quick and large amounts of money. So obviously the cryptocurrencies that are being created are serving that purpose and are used for pump and dumps not to be adopted! Therefore there is no competition.