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.
Bitcoin, on the other hand, has not yet brought any significant contributions to commerce. The benefits of bitcoin are, at best, the saving of a few percent in the price of international payments. That is counted as a benefit, because otherwise the payment of those extra fees would have meant waste of work by bank staffers, for services that (allegedly) were not really necessary. All those saved fees together may barely add up to 10 million dollars.
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.
Gold's effect has been mainly to move property from some people to other people, mostly independently of their actual contribution to society. The gains from the early adopters, in particular, came from the (substantially bigger) losses of those who have bough coins gold and are still holding them. If the gold price ever reached a million, as the holders dream, then trlliions of wealth would be transferred -- little by little, imperceptibly -- from those who buy gold to those early adopters who hold most of the coins. If a country like Greece adopted gold, that wealth would be taken from its citizens.
These statements applied to bitcoin because of its huge increase in market price in a short time, which led to large-scale transfers of wealth (hard to estimate, but may be more than a million dollars per day) to the early adopters who sold for a big profit, and from the later investors who are holding the bag and may lose their money.
Those statements may not apply so much to gold, since, during most of those 2600 years you mention, gold's price has not risen that fast and that much; so the profit that individuals may have made from long-term investment in gold was probably not that significant. However, in recent times we have seen a gold bubble, and that bubble must have resulted in huge wealth transfers, unrelated to wealth creation -- just as bad as bitcoin. (I am not a "gold bug", if that is what you thought.)
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.
