Right but during the Roman empire they didn't have trillions in value circulating around. Maybe a few million. Now I know most of that was printed, but some value is created vs traded.

If I left my fields fallow there is no monetary value in doing so (unless I'm being paid to intentional do so, but not what I mean here). By raising animals am I creating value when you trade your assets that you acquired through trade and barter?

The create vs trade is a hard concept to get my head wrapped around.

You can do nothing and create no value. But you need and want things in life so you need to do things to have assets to trade to acquire your wants and needs. You acquire your assets from others who have done the same thing. Where does the new "excess" value get created? Birthing new humans faster than old humans die? Perhaps.

Essentially what this gets at is the idea that Bitcoin always goes up in value due to small deflationary pressures in a Bitcoin standard world. The upper right quadrant of the Bitcoin sigmoid value curve.