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There certainly seem to be a shift happening with how institutions evaluate gold versus crypto. Crypto delivers transparency and worldwide liquidity that gold just can't match in the digital era but I still think gold maintains value as a hedge and a physical asset, Banks moving into crypto makes sense strategically but I wouldn't rule gold out totally just yet.
There is also a digital version of gold so anyone can buy gold digitally and physically like buyers of the past and the banks moving into crypto is really part of the banks’ own awareness of Bitcoin so banks are starting to make decisions that are surprising to many people because maybe the banks have been very impressed with the transparency system in Bitcoin. So this could be a breakthrough for banks because previously banks didn’t really like Bitcoin, but in the end they also had to admit that the system in Bitcoin is the best and they are starting to want to move to it.
Does it help to proclaim that there is a digital form of gold, when that is not true.
Sure, there has been various gold representations that would be claims on gold, but they are not actual gold because gold is not digital, there are likely hundreds of claims on each ounce of gold, and these have been ways to manipulate the gold for decades, since it is also much more difficult to claim possession of the actual gold, which is physical not digital.
Bitcoin's being digital by nature brings it advantages, and sure there are likely already markets that make more bitcoin than actually exist by making multiple claims on bitcoin, so in that regard there are going to be attempts to manipulate bitcoin, even though bitcoin is easier to take possession than gold.. there are still a lot of folks who choose not to take possession of their claims on bitcoin.
We will see the extent to which bitcoin ends up being manipulated in the future and/or the extent to which actions are taken by bitcoin users to either take possession of their coin or to verify that the actual claims about existing bitcoin are reflective of the quantity of bitcoin that are held by the one claiming to have possession of those bitcoin (the private keys).