Gold and gold buggery are separate. Gold and silver have deep precedence as money. They're also useful commodities. Gold buggery involves retail investors disproportionately allocating to gold as a buy-and-hold asset, often with emotional attachment. Those buying crypto because it's going to free the world or whatever resemble the latter.
Are central banks retail investors? Are they buying gold to "to free the world or whatever"? No [1]?
Gold and silver have deep precedence as money. This leads to them trading as haven assets, i.e. their price rises when financial conditions deteriorate. Bitcoin doesn't. It trades as a risk asset, i.e. its price falls when financial conditions deteriorate. This could change! But that's true of literally every thing traded.
Bitcoin has that rep as well.
It's proving quite useful to Russia's central bank which is selling gold to China as many of its other reserves have been frozen.
This could be an interesting thread in itself.
https://www.kitco.com/news/2022-05-26/Gold-is-an-antique-ins...
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/gold-canada-reserves-1.3443...
You don’t need to stick it in a bank when you’re digging it up in a those volumes every year.
The truth is probably based on the money they received from selling the gold as a retail coin
Gold scams have been around for a significant number of decades. Bitcoin has been hyped to death for its entire existence, in spite of the "properties" it shares with gold.
Note: I own neither.
Gold is tremendously useful for many applications and I believe all that you mentioned are brittle in comparison. I believe it's also rarer than a few on that list.
Mainly, I've heard a few people in my life contend that we only arbitrarily decided that gold has a use, or that it's mostly hype. I don't think that's the full case. It's workable, useful, biocompatible, profitability extractable, and obviously stunningly pretty. Not so much just culturally significant just on a whim or something, it's useful.
