The world has used gold as money for thousands of years because its purchasing power cannot be inflated away by governments and banks. Gold is mined at roughly the same pace as the increase in world population.
Well, you are forgetting 17th century southern Europe when Spain imported so much plundered gold from the New World that it caused widespread inflation.
This raises an interesting questions: Is bitcoin (or something like it) the final nail in coffin of nationalism? Once everyone's using the same money... doesn't that largely remove the need for government beyond the local level?