The distinction is between something that costs money and competes in the maketplace based on that, versus something so insanely expensive the only way it can compete is to pretend it prints actual money and speculate on their future value.

If Bitcoin didn't have bitcoins, nobody in their right mind would pay to an electricity bill the size of Argentina just to keep it running as a distributed timestamping ledger. There is no imaginable practical application that would justify that resource waste.