Bitcoin’s 50% Collapse Exposes Two Industry Myths by Larry Swedroe

Gold (at least so far) tends to more-or-less keep up with inflation over very long times, despite it being rather volatile over shorter timelines as you say. So yeah, if you want to be as sure as possible that your investment will be as valuable as it is today (in real terms) in three years' time then gold's not the right tool for it; but if you want to be as sure as possible that in fifty years' time your investment will be at least in the same ballpark of what it is worth today then gold might make better sense (unless we collectively realize that collecting yellow rocks is silly, that is - but if it hasn't happened so far, chances are that it won't happen within the next fifty years either). Of course, if you can afford to wait 50 years or so then chances are that a pretty standard global market cap-indexed equity fund will return you way more than inflation; but still, in principle a gold allocation can make sense in this context, either to protect yourself from total collapse scenarios (although I think that skills in basic medical aid, gardening, repair and the like would be would be better "investments" for such circumstances) or to benefit a little from the rebalancing bonus (since gold tends also to be fairly uncorrelated from equities). I don't invest in gold, personally; but if somebody wants to keep a 5%-10% allocation or so for the very long term I wouldn't necessarily say that they're making a mistake.