Tiny amounts of gold are needed for electronics and that's only a recently discovered use. For most of history it had no real use other than "it's shiny and people like it." And even today that's still the main use.
It does have physical properties that make it useful though. Its more malleable than most metals for example. Other metals are shiny.
Ok, and what uses are those?
If gold were only valuable because of electronics:
It would only recently have become valuable
The demand for gold would very quickly be met by limited mining since very little of it is actually needed
The only other practical use it's put to is jewelry. Which is "merely people deciding gold is valuable." In theory it could be put to many more uses like guttering and water pipes but in practice it costs too much to extract to be used to that.
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