Outside of a few incredibly niche industrial uses that have only emerged in recent years, no one has had any need of gold except as a means of storing and exchanging value. It has been used as a store of value and as a currency throughout history and across cultures for a number of reasons, such as its recognizability (few things in nature are the same color), its difficulty in counterfeiting (gold has a number of unique properties like its density that would make it very obvious if you were trying to pull one over on a merchant), it's ease-of-use (gold is highly malleable and has a very low melting point, meaning it can easily be made into coins or bars), its rarity (supply is reasonably constrained by the difficulty of mining), its permanence (gold will not tarnish except under extreme conditions, so it's okay to leave in a vault for years on end). However an important property that also contributed is specifically gold's lack of utility - steel was very valuable in pre-industrial societies, but a pound of raw steel is worth less than the tools that could be made from that same pound of steel, so if anyone made steel coins, they wouldn't remain coins for long. If anything, the development of real uses of gold make it less desirable as a store of value - speculation artificially drives up the cost of consumer goods like electronic devices.
People need to be able to store and transfer wealth. Tools which facilitate this are valuable for being able to serve that purpose. Gold is one such tool, and a pretty good one at that.
Outside of a few incredibly niche industrial uses that have only emerged in recent years, no one has had any need of gold except as a means of storing and exchanging value. It has been used as a store of value and as a currency throughout history and across cultures for a number of reasons, such as its recognizability (few things in nature are the same color), its difficulty in counterfeiting (gold has a number of unique properties like its density that would make it very obvious if you were trying to pull one over on a merchant), it's ease-of-use (gold is highly malleable and has a very low melting point, meaning it can easily be made into coins or bars), its rarity (supply is reasonably constrained by the difficulty of mining), its permanence (gold will not tarnish except under extreme conditions, so it's okay to leave in a vault for years on end). However an important property that also contributed is specifically gold's lack of utility - steel was very valuable in pre-industrial societies, but a pound of raw steel is worth less than the tools that could be made from that same pound of steel, so if anyone made steel coins, they wouldn't remain coins for long. If anything, the development of real uses of gold make it less desirable as a store of value - speculation artificially drives up the cost of consumer goods like electronic devices.
People need to be able to store and transfer wealth. Tools which facilitate this are valuable for being able to serve that purpose. Gold is one such tool, and a pretty good one at that.