That is circular reasoning. You can buy gold with money just like you can with bitcoins as well. There is no 'Gold Standard' to the former, nor the latter. Both are pure fiat currencies.
Most people when they say they 'hold gold in their portfolio' don't mean they have the metal lying in their safe. They usually hold shares in a tracking stock like [1], or are active in the commodities market speculating with futures and options on gold, or invested in gold mining companies.
Their is ofc also a real industrial demand for gold. Jewelry makers, electronics firms etc. will take delivery of and use the real metal to make products. For everyone else, it is just numbers in a computer that are transferred from account to account. even when Central banks buy and trade with each-other, the gold never leaves the vault (although it might sometimes be moved from stack to stack inside)
Lately trust in some of these vaults and the accessibility to the actual gold held there has declined, resulting in countries 'repatriating' their gold[2]. As you can imagine, this is not a trivial logistics operation.
While the ownership may change, the actual gold never leaves the huge vaults of e.g. the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/markets/etfs/gld/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_repatriation
Most people when they say they 'hold gold in their portfolio' don't mean they have the metal lying in their safe. They usually hold shares in a tracking stock like [1], or are active in the commodities market speculating with futures and options on gold, or invested in gold mining companies.
Their is ofc also a real industrial demand for gold. Jewelry makers, electronics firms etc. will take delivery of and use the real metal to make products. For everyone else, it is just numbers in a computer that are transferred from account to account. even when Central banks buy and trade with each-other, the gold never leaves the vault (although it might sometimes be moved from stack to stack inside)
Lately trust in some of these vaults and the accessibility to the actual gold held there has declined, resulting in countries 'repatriating' their gold[2]. As you can imagine, this is not a trivial logistics operation. While the ownership may change, the actual gold never leaves the huge vaults of e.g. the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. [1] https://www.investopedia.com/markets/etfs/gld/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_repatriation