If I bought a bitcoin at $100 and sold it at $1,000 - who lost money trading with me? The person I bought it from because they could have kept it and made the money I made? No - they were happy to realise their own returns. The person I sold it to? Assuming they still have it, they hold something valued substantially above $1,000 and are quite happy.
The only way for this to be zero sum is if bitcoin has zero value. But bitcoin has at least some utility so now the market is just arguing over how much - and that value changes as bitcoin becomes more accepted / useful.
The only way the current crop of investors can make money is by getting even more newer investors (ie greater fools). Eventually such a scheme will fail because of the same reason that ponzi schemes fail.
Compare this to something like apple which has an additional cash in (ie the company's profits). So the apple investors can make money without needing more investors.
You make it sound like the market is two participants - me and the guy I took 300k from.
In reality, the market is broad as well as deep. You can lose $10 on one project, make $20 on another, and come out with $10 profit overall. Someone else can reverse that trade and come out with $10 profit as well.
Your argument is wildly wrong because you cannot add negative numbers and make a positive. You simply invent random transactions to come up with a desired outcome, and refuse to look at the big picture.
The whole cryptomarket is a negative sum game, because of the costs of electricity, bandwidth and personnel. For every dollar that goes into the whole cryptocurrency market to buy a coin, less than a dollar comes out, because some of that money is buying mining rigs and generator plants.
This is certain because there is a law of conservation of money in this case. Cryptocurrency neither creates nor destroys fiat currency, so the inputs and outputs have to net equal less than zero.
Why don't you try to come up with some sequence of actual transactions in a "toy" market with a small enough number of participants that you can work through it by hand, not forgetting to take out money from the pot for electricity, network, and personnel? You'll soon see that this network net destroys money - it doesn't create it.
If you don't believe it, I'll write you a math proof, but TBH if you don't understand the explanation above, you'll understand the math proof even less.
A market of one token that was initially worth nothing 1 year ago but the market now sees has value - let's say $100 - because it has some genuine utility - various companies have said they will accept it as payment for a variety of different products.
If you add all the cashflows for trading on this token over the year, $100 has been made. In fact the only way for these cashflows to sum to zero is for the token to be worth zero.
Where did that value come from? It came from the increased utility of the token.
