Gold has been used as a store of value for countries which do not trust their fiat.

It's also used to speculate.

It's also used in industry.

It's actually pretty easy to turn gold into fiat and vice versa outside of north America. It's also fairly easy to do it in North America as well. The spread between buy/sell is also quite low.

Is gold used as an investment/speculation vehicle? My impression was that generally was quite ill advised to 'invest' into gold.

yes, i'd rather buy a farm and no gold (someday i'll buy a urban farm)