Nah, even then someone has the money, you just have less.

Not when the money never existed in the first place.

These shitcoins with billion dollar market caps never actually took a billion dollars into any accounts. The volume is fake, the activity is fake, the price is fake.

Yeah, but the "money" is irrelevant. 99% of their buying power (which in a simple sense is what people usually mean when they say wealth) went away.

That's silly. If a real coin, in your hand, goes from being worth $1 to 1¢, who made money?

How can a real physical coin lose 99% of its value? That's inflation

How can a crypto coin lose 99% of its value? It was worth nothing to begin with. No wealth created, no wealth destroyed. Plain transference.

Better example with coins:

If I convince one person to pay $10 for a quarter, are all quarters worth $10?

If you answered "yes", you can run https://coinmarketcap.com/.

Technically, Jerome Powell did. Currency valuation is complex because it is relative so the lens of perspective becomes everything. The primary nuance in your example is that currency devaluation through inflation is not the same as currency devaluation through a decrease of adoption (and therefore overall buying power): this is very clearly reinforced by the IMF's criteria for what a currency requires to become the global reserve. Any modicum of "objective" value can only be reached through multiple relative comparisons. For example:

- How many Dollars does a bitcoin buy?

- How many Bitcoins does a Dollar buy?

- When the exchange rate varies, what does that say about the relative value of each currency?

- How many Potatoes can a Dollar buy?

- How many Potatoes can a Bitcoin buy?

- How many Drugs can a Dollar buy?

- How many Drugs can a Bitcoin buy?

The above is extremely oversimplified but much like a global foreign exchange relies on shifting exchange rates, so does the value of all currency in terms of relative buying power. In terms of absolute buying power - my personal highly subjective bid is that a currency's "value" is a compound of its' exchange rate as well as the amount of people willing to exchange it, and the amount of it in circulation as well as the breadth of people willing to accept it in exchange for goods and services.

The person who sold it to you for $1 (or, possibly, the person who sold it to them, recursively).

If A mints a coin for free and sells it to B for $0.25, B sells it to C for $0.50, C sells it to D for $0.75, and D sells it to E for $1.00, at which point it crashes to zero, A, B, C and D have all made $0.25 each, and E has lost $1.00, but nothing of value was created or destroyed.

E incorrectly believed that the coin was worth $1.00 and thus that more wealth existed in the world than was actually the case, but that doesn’t mean wealth was ever destroyed, just that his incorrect estimate was updated.

What you say is only true in a liquid and transparent market.

You can only make that determination when that "someone" utilizes the asset in some manner or converts it back to the original currency.