I agree that gold and fiat money are both faith-based, and I want to emphasize that I am not a gold-bug--almost all my assets are in revenue-producing real estate.

There is, however, a massive qualitative difference between gold and fiat: fiat has an adverse selection problem. The government that issues it can print as much of it as it wants, and it's more likely to do so precisely at the times when the country is in trouble.

Gold depends on faith, but failure of faith in gold isn't as correlated with failure in the rest of the economy.