I know people out there who have invested a lot in gold under the belief that in the event of like complete societal collapse or hyperinflation, they could use it for purchasing.
I have the hunch it’s a scam, but I haven’t learned enough monetary theory, business, or economics to understand why.
Obligatory not an economist, only know some basics about investing (and quite lazy about it)
I always thought that gold is just a rather unique commodity that people can also have the option of holding physically (not that it’s advised to do so). Professional investors invest in just about anything as long as there is a potential return on investment, like typical stocks and bonds, gold and silver, housing/land, art, literal truckloads of food… frankly gold isn’t even remotely the weirdest or “scammiest” on this list
As for more regular people, I do have a suspicion a lot of con-artists and/or people with suspicious intents heavily promote gold investing though. Also some libertarian types have a weird… fantasy? of total societal collapse with them rising to the top post-collapse, which I do not quite understand. But I’d presume gold would be attractive to those types since gold has been used as a means of transaction for a long time in human history
Bad news for the Libertarians: silver was historically way more common for money than gold was, to the point that languages like Irish and French use the same word for money as for silver.
This is because there was (and is) way less gold than silver, so gold is way more valuable. As such, gold coins were only used to buy things like houses, horses, and suits of armour. Silver coins were much more practical; the linked article mentions that Ptolemaic Egypt had to export large quantities of grain to bring in enough silver to pay their army despite there being gold in Egypt.
But more than that, if there is a complete societal collapse, the metal you’ll want is iron. Societal collapse doesn’t mean things continue as they have been except there are no safety or food quality laws. It means everybody goes back to peasant agriculture using tools made of wood and iron (well, steel, which is iron with extra stuff in it). If money is used, it might well be something where no coins actually change hands; everybody just remembers how much they owe their neighbours, and how much their neighbours owe them. That, if course, assumes that in the event of complete societal collapse, we don’t decide to give local communism a try.