No brainer if I'm offered Gold or something else, I'd always go for Gold. Simply can't go wrong with that.
(my only exception once a while could be : Platinum)
Of course, "something else" may yield higher profit or alike in the future but at my age that's not my primary concern. Nothing virtual beats the security of physical AU in your own hands.
You must be really old
Thinking that "virtual" (mind you, that's actually "digital") is somehow less real than physical.
Do you also consider email not to be real letters?
Hehe, being old has its advantages...
Digital is not necessarily less real than physical - but I do know Bits flip-flop all too easy, maintained by storage devices never intended to work for longer than a few years, built by the cheapest component bidder somewhere in asia.
Bits are nothing of value unless you can convert them into something valuable while they exist for your use.
Bits can vanish for a number of reasons, since they're always relying 100.0% of all times on a whole series of hightech requirement chains. Take a single one of these links away and the chain breaks.
Technically speaking, they're just as real as gold but are always a "heavily endangered species" in comparison. They're easy to erase or manipulate.
Gold (or any other precious metal) does not rely on anything. It just exists in physical form since billions of years (and don't get me started on paper gold, anyone holding these IOUs for other than trading purposes is a fool).
EMails are real letters, but converted into the digital world. Try to hold them on any storage platform for 20 years+ and you find out why digital storage conservation is such a hefty issue (even for professional storage industry). Do it using consumer storage devices and you're in for a religious experience, unless you very carefully maintain a 100% constant migration stragety. In comparison, it's easy to find physical letters (despite being paper) that even survived world wars or many centuries.
There's a saying that "the internet never forgets" but that's a myth. Every day, uncountable amounts of data vanish into DEV>NUL without you even knowing they ever existed. Plus, one shouldn't take free/unrestricted access to the internet as granted and "will be there forever". That's a foolish assumption at best, as lots of factors could interfere with that.
Therefor, there
are significant differences between virtual and real goods. Many people didn't know these and learned it the hard way one day with far less relevant matters than money.
Now imagine people converting their wealth into the digital world and unknowingly accepting all these risks they aren't even aware of.
Plus, all that stuff is even connected to the Internet in order to work. Worst security preconditions one could possibly think of.
When it comes to increasingly long timeframes, anything digital is simply no competition to physical value, no matter what anyone wants to tell you otherwise (i.e. "as good as gold").
That's the advantage of being an older generation, over time you learned what
value really means.
