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you do not have to mark your crypto holdings to market as mark-to-market is related to commercial accounting itself and in particular risk management.
crypto is relatively illiquid non-cash.
you ignored the word "inflow". how much of the original principal is lost. 0 - 100% aside from certain margin purchases. and certainly not 100's of times as much (i.e. 100m -> 4bn).
you pay 100m "cash" in. if crypto falls 100% you don't owe 4bn right? the damage done to your finances overall from start to finish net is 100m right?
mark-to-market accounting is related to risk and transparency because companies tend to leverage their unrealised gains in other financial activity.
margin calls are triggered at an amount calculated based on
i. the ratio of the sum of your inflows (i.e. your collateral) to the market value of your (leveraged) crypto holdings
ii. mitigated by your individual/company risk profile.
you can change that "certain amount" by increasing inflows i.e. paying in more collateral i.e. increasing your collateral.
the margin call itself is a request for an additional inflow.
so YES margin calls are based on "inflows" aka "all your inflows" aka "the sum of your inflows" aka "your total collateral".
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to avoid taking an extensive safari of finance and to stick to the point i want to return to my question 3 from above.
my point was that crypto market cap will cause less damage than the equivalent stock or bond market cap % reduction from the same point on the way down overall. and would do less damage than an equivalently sized (but mature) bond/stock market.
margin calls, leverage etc play less of a role in crypto because crypto is a small less mature market and the re-leveraging of unrealised gains is more common in bond and stock markets. which means that the damage done in crypto by margin calls, leverage etc are even smaller relative to bond and stock markets.
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to explain with a concrete example we jall ust saw (and have seen a few times) crypto lose more than half of its value.
in fact BTC lost 82% of it's value and dragged the entire market down with it in 2017 - 2018.
what massive effect did that have on main street i.e. the real productive economy? hardly any.
yes derivatives in crypto are more developed now but is nothing like the size or breadth or the leverage of the bond/stock markets.
if the stock market or bond prices FELL 50-60% the real productive economy would be in serious trouble.
to compound everything the crypto (relatively volatile hot air / smaller inflows inflated) market is GLOBAL. the USA is only about 60% of the less than 1tn that we are talking about.
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TL;DR the dangers of a crypto crash are overblown. as the price is more easily inflated, the tokens less liquid and a secondary and/or derivative market is still developing the knock-on effects of such a crash will be less pronounced than with the "equivalent" crash in bond or stock markets. crypto is relatively illiquid and is not easily spent in the economy and nor is it in practice easily fungible with other asset classes. as such the damage to participant inflows would be smaller than in bond/stock and so the knock-on effects in the real-world "productive economy" would be less due to a relatively smaller loss of capital inflows overall.
