That's slightly incorrect. Gold has intrinsic value beyond industrial uses. Intrinsic value doesn't require utility (but it often includes it), it only requires

That's slightly incorrect. Gold has intrinsic value beyond industrial uses. Intrinsic value doesn't require utility (but it often includes it), it only requires a use beyond a consensus exchange rate and speculation. Many people enjoy using gold in jewelry for its own sake, not because they want to speculate on it. That enjoyment functions as organic demand, which increases the price. As long as a thing has consumer demand that doesn't derive from speculation or decay quickly with time, it can have intrinsic value. Phrased another way, "jewelry" and "dentistry" are both legitimate uses of gold, because they both create organic consumer demand (and from what I can tell most people don't use gold in jewelry for speculative reasons). The author's usage of the word "intrinsic" is confusing to me, because its fuzzy and imprecise. He's not really using the term in the traditional financial sense, as you would in e.g. fundamental valuation, or options pricing (theta decay, etc).