It really ticks me off when I hear the ads that some companies put out trying to sell gold. They claim that gold is a means to store value that will never go bad, unlike stocks and currencies, etc. The real truth is that gold has value for precisely the same reason that currencies do, namely that people are willing to accept gold in exchange for other assets. Gold has no more actual intrinsic value than any financial asset. Now, as this article points out, there are other assets that are stores of value. If your concern really is storing value in the event of a true economic collapse, only one of these alternatives really makes any sense. In a true societal collapse, only guns and ammo would have true intrinsic value, namely that they give you the ability to defend yourself and your property. It the SHTF scenario, none of the other possibilities, including gold, would really be worth anything.
I maintain that society would have to devolve a very long way indeed for money (true money like Gold and Silver) to lose its essential utility.
Unless events push society back to a literal stone age - a hunter-gatherer existence with no farming - then money will still be valuable.
Why is money important? Because it allows for the "concidence of wants" without which trade is impossible.
I invite the thread to join me in a thought experiment.
Let us imagine that the dollar has finally collapsed and that we live in a Mad Max dystopian nightmare.
In the center of this brave new world you run a chicken farm (appropriately defended by traps, barbed wire and kick-ass FReepers with sniper rifles).
This month you have costs - you need to hire a guy to mend the generator and a midwife to help with your daughter's pregnancy. How are you going to pay them?
They have what you want - but do you have what they want?
Unless you have some money there is no "coincidence of wants".
The generator guy and the midwife have no use for a hundred chickens! They need to replace their working materials (bearings, WD 40, medical supplies, etc) and upkeep their spiky Mad Max cars by trading with people who live a hundred miles away.
But if you have money then you can trade with them.
Continuing the example of a chicken farm - it's market day! There are a hundred customers lined up at the gates of your compound, They want what you have - but do they have what you want?
Fifty of them have wheelbarrows of devalued fiat currency and bad attitudes. You have no use whatever for their bundles of useless scrip.
Forty of them will offer some form of barter. They offer you alcohol, batteries, hunks of homemade cheese, their lithe nubile bodies, etc.
You are faced with the time and expense of evaluating forty different barter offers, many of which you will have absolutely no use for, or that your heavily-armed wife will veto.
And ten customers offer you money: Gold and Silver. These are your favorite customers: their real money fulfills the requirement for a coincidence of wants. You can take what they offer you, and use it to buy the services of the midwife, the engineer, etc.
In summary: trade relies on the coincidence of wants which in turn relies on money.
At the moment we can still use fiat currencies for trade, because fiat currency still (sort of) works like money. But we won't be doing that when we've passed into Zimbabwe or Wiemar republic mode.
Hope this was helpful.
The monetary attraction of gold entails: it is mined at a rate roughly on par with the increase in world total economic value, it can easily be purified to a verifiable quality, it does not corrode/break/leak/react/etc, value density is convenient (not too much/little value in a convenient coin/brick size), is fungible, is easily rendered into any suitable size, and has some (but not too many!) uses in industry & art. Most everyone values it about the same for what it is. Nothing else is so universally convenient for storing significant, but not enormous, value.
The value of gold for SHTF scenarios is preserving wealth thru the scenario, a way to “bury money” with little concern about converting it back to economic liquid forms once society recovers.