Right now a non-trivial chunk of compute power, storage and engineering effort is spent on advertising and marketing. I'd rather take crypto, at least it's easier to ignore.

Marketing doesn't inflate hardware prices by 500 %.

That's debatable, and really depends on what hardware you count.

Precious metals are reasonably compact, easy to store and have inherent value due to their relative rarity.

Bring back the gold standard, and enjoy your popcorn as the entire solar system rushes to build supermassive particle accelerators that bombard base metals with all sorts of stuff until they turn into gold. It really is the same principle as brute-forcing meaningless hashes until you get a predetermined prefix. Only in this case the desired prefix has 79 protons.

Black hole accretion disks are more efficient for that:

https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/464790d2497de

Things only have value for their utility. Anything else is a consensual hallucination.