“Therefore, in a crisis it (gold) has no real value.”
what does have values in a crisis? Once you have food, shelter, bullets, etc. I assume you want to preserve your wealth. Are you happier with a bunch of paper with dead presidents on it? or a metal that has preserved wealth for thousands of years?
Wealth in a crisis is usable commodity-based, but, as I said, gold has some intrinsic value but it is limited.
Wealth in a crisis is guns, land, food, fuel/energy, means of transportation, means of heavy labor.
Now, what do we define as a crisis is the real question. There are some crises in which gold would have trading value, but there are others in which a person must preserve his/her own life and that of loved ones.
In that latter crisis, gold has little value.
Also, as wmfights pointed out, physical gold in quantity is owned by big players. To buy a Maple Leaf, for example, requires one hundred bucks over market price of gold. That's just about 1600 bucks.
The price alone guarantees that large buyers will be the bulk of that market.
And then we're talking another fee to convert back to usable currency.