Just because something is expensive to produce doesn’t mean that it’s worth that much.
Well ... it kinda does? If a commodity cannot be produced for less than $X, then the price of that commodity is not going to be that far below $X. The price can vary away to anywhere you like to signal for producers to open and close in the short term, but the equilibrium price point is ~= cost of production and the market will trend in that direction.
I'm going off one article [0] but there is enough gold to make a 28m x 28m x 28m cube. That isn't a lot of gold when compared to the 8 billion humans in the world and the amount of metal we go through (of iron, aluminium, copper, etc). Unless something really novel happens in the mining space, the price is never going to be low enough that an ordinary person can have a big block of gold. It will stabilise on the cost to mine pretty quickly.
There are other metals that are just as good as gold (like platinum) that get less press but are similarly priced.
[0] https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-much-gold-has-been-found-world
This sparks an interesting thought (for me) - gold mining (and really, any mining) is intertwined in modern times; copper mining produces gold as a by-product for example. We derive palladium and platinum from refining for other metals, we get sand for concrete from gold mining, etc. Point being, the mining industry is interwoven as to what is extracted for refinement, the by-products of that refinement (and the environmental destruction :() which of course is all economically intertwined. A mine probably won't shut down, it would probably shift to another focus?
But Bitcoin is mined for one thing (itself) and produces environmental waste (heat, etc.) with no by-products (another coin?) and no other mining (Monero?) produces Bitcoin as a by-product. So it makes me think that while it sounds good on paper to compare Bitcoin to Gold, it really doesn't work like that in real life.
I don't think this says anything about why the gold price is what it is. If gold suddenly gained lots of value then it would still be cost + margin, because new mines would open up in places where gold mining had previously been unprofitable.
This price chart, especially since early 2019, seems to suggest otherwise:
Gold isn't being treated all that differently to the other period 6 or 11 elements. Although it does sometimes get randomly good tax treatment due to its history which keeps it entrenched as the first choice for a monetary metal. But fundamentally it is being sold at cost to mine + a margin, same as everything else. My memory is anything with similar properties to gold has a similar price. The bulk of its value comes from nobody being able to produce the stuff for much less than $50k/kg US.
If history was erased, the price of gold would go down a bit because demand drops, but it would still be somewhere similar to $50k/kg US - to a first approximation people can't produce gold more cheaply than that. The price might even go up if the cheap producers are big bulk-mining operations.