Gold is needed in health care, electronics, space, physics... The supply is limited, and unlike bitcoin someone can't just rename gold to dolg and start mining the new version.
Bitcoin, at it's current price is not cheaper than gold. I would argue that it's more expensive, considering its limited use.
And what percentage of gold's current value would be supported solely by it's industrial applications? A fraction of a percent? This hardly seems like an intrinsic value argument - almost all of gold's real intrinsic value is that heavy elements are hard to produce and among them, it and silver have the best combination of scarcity and other properties to make them suitable for a physical implementation of a secure distributed account system. Likewise, paper also had great value as a physical implementation of a document storage system.
Gold production value is maybe 10-20 times lower than it's speculative value. Just check how much gold is sitting in vaults and not being sent to factories. If it's only demanded for production, then the price would be much-much lower.
Bitcoin has many uses too, not only for reservation demand. It has scripts to protect contracts without expensive court system, blockchain can be used as a secure timestamp service, or a global name registry. It's full of opportunities apart from protecting your wealth.
You're forgetting that at any point, any government can prohibit using bitcoin, as they did previously with gold, and may prohibit using these scripts. What's left?
Sure, you may not be able to purchase things locally with it, but it's just a computer program and information, you can hardly prohibit with any force. Look at tor.
jimktrains2 if the gov decides that bitcoin should be made illegal, most people won't bother with it. And if you can't use it locally what value does it have at that point? Gold you can at least bury in your backyard and hope that if not you, then your grandchildren will get something out of it.
