Steve Wozniak (apple co founder) said something interesting in an interview recently. He said humanity will invent better and more efficient methods to harvest gold from the earth's crust. Bitcoin's algorithmic method of limiting its own production has superior chances of maintaining a constant rate of supply.
The real test of gold is whether society can realistically revert to a gold standard in cases of emergency. If a zombie apocalypse occurred tomorrow, would gold emerge as a preferred coin of exchange across remnants of civilization? There are clips on youtube where people walk the streets attempting to sell $1,000 of gold or silver for $50. No one takes them up on it. The concept of gold and its value as a currency may be too neglected within the public eye to be an emergent currency in times of distress. Not only is support for gold exchange non-existent, its utility as a means of exchange may be a lost lore similar to the recipe for making roman concrete or damascus steel.
Golds best hope may be a form of gold renaissance, a resurgence of interest driven by fears relating to fiat hyperinflation. This is occurring in some circles. Preppers, doomsdayers and post apocalyptic planners are all stocking up on precious metals. What gold lacks in bling power and excitement it could more than make up for in endurance.
From my posts on this forum, it might be obvious I favor bitcoin over gold. But even I don't forget gold was here millennia before anyone knew what bitcoin was, and may be around millennia after bitcoin is lost and forgotten.
My assumption is usually that we might have a systemic crisis or collapse, but not an apocalyptic scenario. Sorry if I didn't make it clear. (That is, property and contractual rights are still enforced, but confidence is lost in fiat money.) In fact, here I'm assuming we either won't reach crisis point for now, or the elites are engineering a preventive inflation (using cryptos) so we'll never get there for the foreseeable future.
As Jim Rickards always says, the elites can always have a gold standard that's stable (and indeed prosperous IMO); it's just a matter of what price of gold. (All of the gold-as-deflationary-monster talk from economists are based on cases of trying to maintain an old price of gold that is too low for the new circumstances.)
If I walked around trying to sell 1 ounce gold coins for $50, I doubt anyone would trust me.
But I agree that you never know when society will simply 'forget' a money. Money is just a standard, even if certain basic properties are required before something can become money. I don't however think we're at that point with gold and silver, especially since they're the only monies secured by physics.
A lot of what you would think of as supply and demand based on what people want is actually heavily manipulated by the elites, over the long term. For example, when it suited the global imperial elites to promote gold and demote silver, starting in the 1870s, silver has been outshone by gold ever since. This, knowing that silver is actually a better form of money (since gold would have to move around in tiny quantities for everyday use.)