I can't agree with your opinion or your father's anecdote. Throughout all of history, gold has held intrinsic value in all kinds of civilizations, and is still one of the most valuable elements that's widely traded. If you can't buy groceries with a block of gold (assuming you're not just shredding off dust to pay them), then the seller clearly doesn't understand the value. On the contrary, paper dollars are intrinsically useless, especially since we left the Gold Standard, which links the value of paper dollars to the value of gold.