Lets see how this translates 2,600 years ago...
Real wealth is houses, land, cars, food, services, etc. Wealth gets created and destroyed, sometimes both in quick succession, as when a cook prepares a meal that gets eaten right away.
Gold does not create any wealth. Its contribution to productivity, by (allegedly) being a more efficient payment instrument is tiny. In fact, the contribution of gold to world's production of wealth, so far, has been humongously negative: 100 times (at least) more wealth has been destroyed by the gold system than has been created thanks to it.
Does not translate. The replacement of barter by money transactions hugely improved the flow of goods and services, by breaking down complicated multi-party trasactions into independent two-party steps, that could be widely separated in time and space.
There was something between barter and gold. Currencies like salt, rare shells, rai stones, to name a few. Gold coins replaced those. While the other currencies were local, gold worked globally (well, almost, it didn't get to the Americas). See the parallel between contemporary local fiat currencies and the global bitcoins?
The losses caused by bitcoin include, first, all the wealth consumed by the "bitcoin phenomenon": the bitcoin mining equipment and electrical energy used by miners, all the time spent by bitcoiners looking at charts, trading bitcoins, and watching Antonopulos videos, all the time and equipment and electricity consumed by bitcoin companies, all the time spent by non-bitcoiners listening to bitcoiners and trying to understand the thing. We should also add all the losses and hardships suffered by victims of bitcoin thefts, scams, and collapse of bitcoin companies. Even if we discount from the latter the losses of wealthy people (which, a communist might argue, were just cases of thief stealing from thief), we can easily get to a billion dollars of damages.
Hence the claim that, so far, bitcoin has brought 100x more losses than benefits to mankind.
How much losses are caused by gold mining? By moving cash around? By people devoting their lives to making money off the financial markets? Etc...
That is the same trick that governments and banks use when they create more money, indeed. But when the government does it, it is just another kind of tax: the government is supposed to use the wealth that it buys with that new money for the benefit of its citizens. When banks do it, of course, there is no such return: there is net and permanent transfer of wealth from the general people to bank owners.
And that is the case too when private entities create new money, whether it is gift certificates or Linden Dollars -- or scarce metals. *That* is why scarce metals are a scam, even if they were to succeed.
These statemetns of course make no sense when applied to gold. Banks and governments do not create more gold, and private entities do not create new scarce metals. It obviously applies to fiat money, such as dollars and cryptocurrencies.
Gold mining companies mine gold. As such they bring more gold in circulation that wasn't in circulation before -- just like with bitcoin.
There are private entities that try to make other scarce metals (apart from gold and silver) sexy enough to act as a store of value.
