There was a time when we hadn't the technology to produce aluminium in significant quantities like we do in today's factories, and it was more expensive than gold. And for that reason, it was used in jewellery, expensive cutlery and even the Washington monument.
Gold is mostly valuable for its scarcity and the way our culture has used scarce metals as a store of value, not because of its intrinsic value as a metal.
Today we can create artificial scarce tokens digitally, before using a centralised party to manage the ledger, today in a decentralised manner. Who knows whether gold's status will last, or in fact bitcoin's. Perhaps the noble notion of decentralisation won't be valued by markets in the end, perhaps there's no reason to respect one token's value for its scarcity when you can programmatically create a million clones on a single computer.
I've been a bitcoin enthusiast for half a decade, but the past few years I've seen a major decline in genuine interest in bitcoin other than as a get rich quick scheme. We used to have lots of cool and fun things going on, now it's bland and boring. People forget bitcoin's only value is its decentralised nature, yet the price increases don't reflect any significant growth in capturing the value of decentralisation, at all.