I know people out there who have invested a lot in gold under the belief that in the event of like complete societal collapse or hyperinflation, they could use it for purchasing.
I have the hunch it’s a scam, but I haven’t learned enough monetary theory, business, or economics to understand why.
Why? It’s not inherently valuable beyond a handful of industrial/electronic uses. If society collapses, people are going to be trading in food, water and medicine, not worthless shiny metal.
Even at the basest level of society that we might fall back to, there will be a need for stores of great value in order to make larger trades. You can’t effectively trade large scale without it. Which might not be relevant right after a full system failure, but definitely afterwards.
It has the precedent of societal agreement going back thousands of years longer than literally anything else besides food and prostitution. If the world started over from the stone-age, people would be using precious metals to represent value all over again. You don’t need it to make sense, you just need a social agreement, and that doesn’t happen with just anything that can fall apart or decay or be found easily.