I mean "current" as in today, not historical. I didn't call it a currency, I said it was valuable. I agree that gold is entirely useless - you can't eat it, and

I mean "current" as in today, not historical. I didn't call it a currency, I said it was valuable. I agree that gold is entirely useless - you can't eat it, and it is unhandy; however the gold price today says that for all practical purposes, gold is very valuable right now. Probably because of lack of faith in paper fiat currency right now. This may change; it may be a bubble that collapses if and when faith in paper fiat currency is restored (you could read that as gold filling a temporary but valuable role as a hedge against unstable currencies). Or new deposits of gold could be found; or new ways of extracting it could arise. However the supply of gold is quite limited; it's not like diamond where the only difference between very expensive diamond and cheat-as-dirt coal is a detail of removing impurities and rearranging the atoms.