It all depends on what level of technological and political/social evolution has been achieved.

For instance in ancient Rome when Pompii fled the capital Rome to avoid Ceasar's marching army across the forbidden Rubicon into the capital, Pompii took as much gold as he could from the treasury.

Ceasar knew he had to get the gold back to have ability to purchase more soldiers etc.

However in today's world gold is more likely to be on the backfoot behind the various natural resources the world now has completely uncovered and use in trade.
This might mean that oil could be a better investment than gold at this time, as for land most especially since land like other resources is stagnant in amount whilst the competing traders and consumers is rising drastically and dangerously.

That said though, I would wager that throughout history as a holw over centuries something like gold will remain relatively mor constant in value than even oil or land.

Imagine in future when we can travel to unlimited worlds then natural resources will become much, much less of importance and expense. Yte perhaps the higher and rarer metals like gold and silver and cadmium etc. [use and needed for technical advance] will again at that time become more valuable.'

However IF someone invents a replicator like in star trek TNG we could have all the gold and diamonds we could see. Quite futile.

This just reminds me that the truly most valuable thing in existence is life, love and knowledge.

"However IF someone invents a replicator like in star trek TNG we could have all the gold and diamonds we could see. Quite futile."

Not really, because then we would rely on non-replicable latinum, at least for the Alpha and Beta Quadrants... for convenience it would still probably need to be gold-pressed.

Well, yes and no, snake.

>>As I have pointed out Gold is a store of value.<<

Any commodity is a "store of value". That's why there are exchanges for everything from gold to pork bellies (although I've never quite got my head around the latter).

Fact is, though that you have to convert the "store of value" into some form of tradeable instrument before you can actually use it to buy the groceries. So in that sense, gold is no more "special" than uranium, tin, oil, copper, alumina etc.

Historically of course gold has held a pivotal role, principally, I suspect, because it could be easily turned into a tradeable instrument, with an understood value. For the same reason, silver was also used for many years in the same manner - but, being less scarce in itself, it commanded a lower rate of exchange.

However, if we had, globally, stuck to gold as the standard medium of exchange, there simply isn't enough of the stuff to fund all the investments that have been made in the development of the world economy. Estimates vary, but the most accepted figure is that only around 180,000 tons of the stuff has ever been mined. That would back around 10% of today's world trade, even if it was all available for the purpose (i.e. not in the fillings of your teeth).

But the other half of the story is that for the first time in its history, gold is being "consumed", i.e. taken out of circulation entirely.

This is because of its widespread use in today's technology - computers etc. Here, it is used in such individually small quantities, across millions of devices, that it is uneconomic to recover it to put to other commercial use. Unlike, say, gold fillings.

Estimates of around 12% of annual production goes in this manner.

So, not completely a "store of value", then. Just another mineral commodity, in fact.

also used as the electrical heating element in aircraft windshields where its property of being rolled so thin that it is transparent is most useful.

Pericles,

In my last post I indicated that any physical commodity could be a store of value, but I also mentioned that Gold has all these convenient characteristics that make it ideal for money, whereas Pork Bellies are not unless you run an abattoir I guess. Likewise real estate property cannot be a useful exchange medium and I listed the seven most useful qualities previously that makes gold the ideal money

You are exactly right about Gold when it was on the gold standard. It was linked to gold and could be exchanged for a set and agreed price. World War one was the catalyst that took Great Britain off the full gold standard because it had to print money to pay for the war. However when paper replaced Gold, governments were still obliged to exchange it for gold at a set price at just over $20 per ounce which was then increased to $35 after WW2 at Bretton Woods conference and then abolished entirely in 1971 by Nixon.

As you point out, there isn't enough gold to back the world financial system and why there have been a number of comments by influential people suggesting that Gold will rise by a value of 10 times. I think this is unlikely, but gold may become part of a system that will include a basket of currencies. It can't be ignored entirely in my opinion. If it does rise in value, then of course it become much more economic to mine and solves the problem of availability and quantity whereas at the moment it is marginal at present price. Just imagine the search for the stuff even if it doubles in price.

Continued

A certain amount of gold is used commercially, but not a great deal compared with silver which is used at about 50% of production with very little retrieved from scrap. Again because it is relatively cheap and uneconomic to reclaim. In my opinion silver is a better bet than gold if investment for gain is considered. Its ratio with gold is well above the historical figure of 16:1 At present its around 50:1 in favour of gold. If it comes down to its historical figure against Au then the value would soar.

If you have followed the manipulation in the market by the banks constantly shorting bullion using derivatives, you will understand why the price of PMs are so low. They are crooks in the same way they manipulated LIBOR and High frequency trading.