You could, but unless you have tiny 1gm slivers you'll find it hard to buy food with it.
For total meltdown SHTF scenarios soap, alcohol, cigarettes, chocolate, and maybe seeds are much more practical as barter currencies.
Even without SHTF scenarios, physical gold is a poor store of value because selling physical gold to a broker is an expensive business.
A lot of prestige gold coins are sold at a price premium which brokers will just ignore when buying from you. Even on weight alone, you're very unlikely to get anything close to your purchase price unless the price has gone up by at least a double figure percentage.
The real question is how bad the Covid recession/depression is likely to get. If you're assuming there's a depression-scale downturn then "paper" gold makes more sense than a lot of other investment classes.
There are many, many scenarios other than Business-as-usual and Mad Max. Look at how hyperinflation has played out historically. In Argentina in 2001, imported things like medicine became very expensive. People sold small amounts of gold for fiat when these kinds of expenses came up.
To be fair my comment up thread was wondering about a failure of the financial system - which I interpreted to be more like Threads than The Big Short.
For total meltdown SHTF scenarios soap, alcohol, cigarettes, chocolate, and maybe seeds are much more practical as barter currencies.
Even without SHTF scenarios, physical gold is a poor store of value because selling physical gold to a broker is an expensive business.
A lot of prestige gold coins are sold at a price premium which brokers will just ignore when buying from you. Even on weight alone, you're very unlikely to get anything close to your purchase price unless the price has gone up by at least a double figure percentage.
The real question is how bad the Covid recession/depression is likely to get. If you're assuming there's a depression-scale downturn then "paper" gold makes more sense than a lot of other investment classes.