I'm going to link you to a short essay on the subject of gold that caught my attention. My opinion on the subject:

Gold is loved by some people for no reason, and shunned by others for no reason. So you can't say exactly whether it is better or worse than its reputation. Basically, gold is of less interest to me and I don't own any, as a commodity can never yield a return on its own, but is only dependent on two factors: Supply and demand.

The author's thoughts below were that gold is not good because a) for a long time it was not an investment to multiply one's money and b) because the gold that is in circulation on the financial market is not identical to the gold that actually exists. I have answered both as follows:

1. gold was historically for a very long time an asset which made +-0 returns and even that was enough for people and was "safe". But in the last 20 years, the price has increased tenfold and there is a reason for this: the demand for gold is increasing and, even more importantly, Modern Monetary Theory. Inflation is unmanageably high. Money is only printed and backed by nothing but nuclear bombs and brute force. Government debt is constantly being increased globally according to the motto "If I have to pay, then make me pay". As a result, the value of real assets inevitably continues to rise at the same time as the level of debt.

2. you call the fact that gold can also be artificially created a "danger", but this is actually the opposite. If the supply is actually much lower, the price would have to be much higher. What if it turns out that only a fraction of the securitized gold actually exists? If it is confirmed that a large proportion of the gold reserves held by the USA and Germany on paper have not been in the vaults for decades? The result would not be a crash but a rise in the price of gold to infinity.

By the way, for those who are still young and don't know gold: for old people like me, it's something like $BTC (+0,04%) but offline. *wink wink smiley

Basically, there's only one halfway realistic Black Swan event that can crash gold, and that's if we suddenly start space mining and farm asteroids for gold. But that's not very easy. Even if we could already do this and had done it a few times, you first have to find an asteroid that contains any gold at all and this is also relatively rare, even in space. Unlike many other elements, it is not formed during nuclear fusion in stars, but actually only when neutron stars collide with each other. Which happens from time to time, as the universe feels infinitely old and almost infinitely large, but it doesn't happen very often. Those who are not so familiar with astrophysics can imagine the natural formation of gold in a similar way to Friedrich Merz telling the truth and appearing sympathetic to outsiders - technically speaking, it is not completely impossible, but a lot must have happened.

Incidentally, the fact that gold occasionally has stronger price movements is also nonsense. Volatility is of course not zero, but it is lower than for all other asset classes and the risk of total loss is actually almost ruled out by physics, as described above.

However, it is precisely the low volatility that distinguishes gold from its major competitor, Bitcoin. It has a lot in common with gold. Like gold, it is unfortunately relatively unsuitable for payment - albeit for different reasons. But Bitcoin is actually also a good store of value - unfortunately, it fluctuates far too much to say how much value is actually stored. And theoretically, it can fall to zero when Bitcoin 2 comes out, which is louder, more speculative and twice as expensive and then everyone will only want the new version.

But first of all, it's not so bad to have something that is relatively likely to survive a currency reform, a debt haircut or an arbitrary wave of state expropriation.