I accept your argument that gold can't be printed and created like fiat money. But I am not convinced it is a better alternative. I like to think of fiat currency as the lesser of two evils. At the end of the day you cannot use a gold bar to buy food or put a roof over your head. But you can with fiat currency, even if what you can buy gets less and less.
I suppose I am not convinced the value of gold will hold as is the common argument put forth by proponents. There is no shortage of gold in the world, there's plenty of it. It only takes time to bridge the supply/demand gap. During times when gold wasn't fashionable many miners struggled to break even, as the gold price fell to match the cost of production.
It's an accepted fact that mining, extraction, processing technology improves with time and that constantly lowers costs of finding and producing gold. This applies over the long term, even if short term inflationary pressures mean costs rise.
How rare is gold? There's around 150,000 tonnes of gold in the world out there, yet annual demand, of which 80% to 90% come from jewellery demand, is just 2000 to 3000 tonnes a year. What other commodity do you know where there is 50 times the annual consumption stored away ready for use, and where 80 to 90% isn't really consumed, but merely used until it gets thrown back into the recycle pile and adds to supply!
I'm probably not the person to ask for an informed opinion on gold as I'm hugely biased towards the negative. Fundamentals to me suggest inherent value, for which I believe it is much less than today's price. Therefore I just can't see how buying gold makes sense unless you're a trader preparing to flip the gold after prices move in a certain direction.
