just a quote from warren buffet [Modified by Torque]:

"Gold gets dug out of the ground in Africa, or someplace. Then we melt it down, dig another hole, bury it again and pay people to stand around guarding it. Then over the last 200 years, it gets looted from vaults all over the world, faked, diluted with tungsten, priced set and pegged by monopolistic Elitist Mining Cartels, and ETF'd to death by many orders of magnitude, to the point that no one actually knows how much real Gold even exists in the world today, where it all lives, who controls what amounts (if any), and what its nominally speculative value should even remotely be anymore.

It has no utility. Anyone watching from Mars would be scratching their head.  And a return to a worldwide Gold standard? Fat chance in Hell on that!"