Where? I mean, today, with everything working as we are accustomed to them working, where is gold more useful than whatever works for local currency? I mean there is a conversion cost to get into a local currency, so, factoring an astounding 5% for conversion, where can you use gold at 95% of the usefulness of cash? The only way I could imagine this working would be Argentina, (due to the long standing currency crisis.) but you could use any other currency there cheaper than gold.In large parts of the world gold is a more useful currency,
Gold is too easy to fake. Take an ingot of tungsten, electroplate in gold, and you have an ingot that will pass nearly every nondestructive test for gold. It's the right density, it sounds right, the right conductivity, even a touchstone and chemical tests will show it as gold. This uncertainty will always translate to a discount in real transactions.
The melt value of nickel doesn't have much to do with the value of a nickel. If you want to sell it for melt value, the buyer has to work out the costs of refining it from the alloy in the coins. Nobody runs a refinery for free. This seems like an awkward way to hold value, but, I imagine when things get bad enough, a 12 gauge full of nickels would be a persuasive argument...
There just seems to be this vein of wishful thinking running through the goldbug mind. For the record, I'll be trading giant jars of Adams peanut butter from Costco WTSHTF. We can compare notes after. I am certain that when bad things happen, I can get a nice profit on high density foods, and help my nieghbors. Trading them gold wouldn't do that.