Share your insights or perspective on the financial matter presented in the input.

What intrinsic, non-monetary value does gold have as a commodity?
The answer is that other than a small number of applications (the approx. 10% of gold production that goes to 'industrial uses') gold does not have intrinsic value beyond being pretty and rare (and useful for making jewelry.)  There are a number of 'industrial' applications and uses for gold (see other answers for a list) but the volume consumed this way is fairly small, especially relative to the capacity to mine new gold and reclaim existing gold. If you removed investment, and jewelry usage (especially culturally driven jewelry usage) then there's no way the remaining uses for industry and dentistry could sustain the price levels we currently see for gold.  Furthermore, and perhaps more importantly, the best data I can find for this shows the total number of tons consumed for industrial uses has been shrinking for several years now, and that was prior to recent price increases, so it is difficult to tie that reduced demand to increasing prices.  And one might postulate in a 'collapsed society' you seem to be referring to in your question, that a lot of the recent industrial demand (e.g. the '50 cents of gold in each cellphone') could quite possibly disappear entirely.   The argument many people use for gold having value is usually 'been used as money for thousands of years'.  But this confuses gold having a value of its own with the reasons why something makes a useful currency.  Gold has a large number of characteristics that make it an ideal currency, and of all the elements available it is perhaps the best physical element to serve as a currency. BUT just as with a dollar bill, just because it is a good currency, does NOT give it an intrinsic value. Any currency is only worth what someone will trade you for it.  The value is set by the economy etc., not the medium used as a currency.   So yes, people will probably always use gold as money, but that doesn't make the money worth anything, it's just a medium of exchange. Incidentally two other things should be noted.  The first is that you have a problem when the medium itself used for a currency becomes worth more than the face value.  Hence why we stopped using silver in coins, and there were concerns over pennies due to the price of copper. This leads to the second point, which is that currently, gold is TOO RARE to suffice as a world currency, hence why all countries went off the gold standard years ago.  The size of national and global economies was growing faster than the supply of gold, and hence it was becoming impossible to have enough gold to back all the currencies (inflation concerns aside).