That comparison to gold is only apt when the price of BTC is relativy stable. There is no relevant comparison to gold as an asset class when bitcoin is so volatile. In order to be a valid gold alternative it needs to have a stable, predictable value. Nobody that wants gold in their portfolio is going to want to replace it with an unpredictable and volatile asset.
There's no need for rhetoric comparing BTC to gold. It's not gold, it isn't like gold, and we dont need another form of gold. Let Bitcoin be its own thing.
Except in wartime during a huge recession, gold is still worth something because there's demand for it and it can be traded for fiat currency. Gold has that world-wide, century long track record, and history proves it does. Bitcoin has yet to survive recessions and wars. Thus far, it isn't even stable during boom.
As long as cryptocoins aren't accepted as much as fiat currency (and they're not even _remotely_ near 1:1), they'll be in lower demand during less glorious times. Practically nobody (less than now) will accept cryptocoins then because you can't use them to buy anything worthwhile. A man's gotta eat, and keep the chin above the tide.
I'd rather see merchants use Ripple until this whole BCash/Bitcoin war is settled and scalability is solved since it's faster. But yeah BCash transactions were less than 8 cents when I tried it.
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https://notehub.org/z6ztu
Litecoin is equally cheap, has fast block times and no such risk.
Neither will scale sufficiently without off-chain transactions.