[Schultzy]

If you try to value gold objectively (its industrial and possibly jewelry use), its price should be significantly lower than what it is today.

I think you might be misunderstanding what gives things value. The $20 bill in my pocket has little objective value by your definition. Sure, I could use it as a building material by papering a small piece of my wall with it or I could make an origami ring out of it, but the object's value is not determined by what can be made out of it.

Value is subjective to people's desires and beliefs about what is worth trading for. Gold has value because (almost) everyone anywhere on the planet will accept it in trade.

Gold is priced in dollars and when dollars are flying off of the printing press, but very little new gold is being produced, it follows that the price of gold would increase in terms of dollars. It is inflation that is mostly responsible for driving the price of gold up, not fear.

I'm not suggesting that everyone should be 100% into gold, I merely think that people looking for real value, would find gold very attractive as a reliable way to preserve it.

[Aloisius]

Yes you are correct. I use fundamental or intrinsic value in the financial sense. That relies on summing the future income and then discounting it to the present value. As a $20 bill has no future income, it has significantly less value than $20 invested in even a government bond.

[kyrsey]

What makes gold "real" value and other exchangeable items not "real" value?

You had better stick to talking about exchange value, because once you get into nebulous discussion of "real" value it becomes immediately relevant that gold is nonproductive at best and prone to fluctuations and bubbles in reality.

If you define the discussion of value as being limited to immediate short term exchange, then it's no surprise that you end up concluding that the only things of "real" value are whatever gives you liquidity. That is a part of the story, after all Berkshire keeps $20-$30 billion liquid as a matter of policy.

But that doesn't tell you anything about future returns or opportunity costs, and it is not the whole story. The idea that gold's value is "real" because others think it is real (or better, have long thought that it is real) is just as viciously circular as saying that currency's value is real because others believe it is real.