Or what if the 'mountain people' are utterly microscopic mites on a tiny ball hurling through space. Ohh, wait, that's the reality.

Well, yes I am aware that my scenario is not literally descriptive of the world right now. The purpose is to inspire an intuitive understanding of why the economic reality of a society with strong upload technology would encourage destroying carbon copies of people who have been uploaded.

so I am not very worried about the first upload having any sort of edge.

I am not worried either. Nothing I said assumes a first-mover advantage or hard takeoff from the first mind upload. I'm describing society after upload technology has matured.

I am pretty sure that nearly anyone would be utterly unable to massively self improve on one's own in any meaningful way rather than just screw itself into insanity

I'm certainly not assuming uploads will be self-improving, so it seems you are pretty comprehensively misunderstanding my point. I do assume uploads will become faster, due to hardware improvements. After some time, the ease and low cost of copying uploads will likely make them far more numerous than physical humans, and their economic advantages (being able to do orders of magnitude more work per year than physical humans) will drive wages far below human subsistence standards (even if the wages allow a great lifestyle for the uploads).