I'm going to ask you the question in reverse. If I give you two choices : holding a fortune of 1 million dollars in paper money in your house, or 1 million dollars in gold in your house, what do you choose ? You can't invest or anything like that, just hold it.
Your dilemma is meaningless (like choosing an integer number between 2 and 3). Money is only a handy
intermediary in the exchange of goods and services (one should never forget that). It doesn't have value of its own (digital money as the most extreme example), apart from the transactional utility only. So if I had to keep 1M dollars and couldn't spend it, that would be basically equal to having no money at all. The situation with gold is essentially the same, though (unless you are a gold bug or just like the shine of the metal, indeed). But if I could spend both the gold (sell it) and the money, I would indeed go for 1M dollars...
Since with money I can buy anything (including gold) while I would have to first sell gold to get the same 1M dollars as money
I didn't mean that you can never spend it, but let's say you need to hold it for 10 years. Do you think the dollar will be worth the same thing in 10 years ? With inflation at 2%, you would lose 18% of your holdings in dollars.
This doesn't add to your question any more meaning, since money is made to be spent, not to be saved, as I have already said. In fact, I don't know how much gold will cost in dollar terms in 10 years (and no one knows), so it may happen that it will cost even less than it does now. But it is ultimately irrelevant since your reasoning still doesn't allow to distinguish in any meaningful ("fundamental") way the paper money backed up by the merchants, which are ready to accept it as a means of payment, from the paper money
allegedly backed up by gold, while in fact backed up by nothing but a promise of the state (since that was the original
claim)...
Which the state can abandon just like that, without much ado and beating about the bush (as I have also shown)
