I suppose if you are running a clean-room chip factory in your garage, gold is useful to you.
Gold prices are not running up because of a demand for gold by end-users, they are running up because people want to put coins in their safety deposit boxes in the hope that in a year someone else will want to pay them a lot more to put the coins in THEIR safety deposit boxes.
I don't imagine even the rabid pro-gold posters are going to argue that gold is a good investment because of it's real-world uses. But since I have trouble imagining how people end up being rabid pro-gold posters, I suppose I could be surprised.
Meanwhile, nobody is buying oil to lock it up in their bank so they can sell it later (well, the oil companies do that, and there is a fledgling oil-purchase exchange where people bought gas years ago which was stored for use at a low price later, but even that was so they could USE it later.
How many gold bugs are going to melt down their coins in a couple of years to make rings, or to finish up their communications satellite, or to gold-plate their own monster audio cables or replace all their old silver fillings?
The uses of gold would fit nicely in bullet form on a small-print 9x11 glossy. I'm certain a skilled writer could fit every useful piece of information about gold in a single book.
And being employed at a site that actually HAS cleanroom manufacturing of chips for multiple uses, your lack of knowledge of my knowledge, while not volume-filling, is not something to brag about.
Only said that to suggest that if you are looking to educate someone, it's better to present information in a positive way without including uninformed judgment that might make you look silly.
You are the one who implied that gold has no practical uses.
But he's really good at making himself look silly. Check it out.
The point is that the value of gold is more constant than the value of paper dollars.