I'm not a "gold aficionado" (author's term) but gold has plenty of "magical" qualities: it's fungible, divisible, universally recognized and easy to test, non-reactive, enduring, beautiful, scarce, and essentially indispensable for some industrial uses.
The value of gold is not universally recognized, and is inflated more from idolization than by its practical uses.
>When I was older, I learned what the fighting was about that winter and the next summer. Up on the Madison Fork the Wasichus (white people) had found much of the yellow metal that they worship and that makes them crazy, and they wanted to have a road up through our country to the place where the yellow metal was... Our people knew there was yellow metal in little chunks up there; but they did not bother with it, because it was not good for anything.
-Black Elk Speaks
There is a reason gold is and has been a "hard" currency.
Gold theoretically has all of these nice properties, but the practicalities get pretty messy.
They mentioned same thing about laminated gold.
The advantage of bitcoin is that you only need to trust public/private key, no miner controls 51% of the mining power & you aren't experiencing an extremely powerful and sustained sybil attack.