One difference between Gold and Bitcoin which I don't see discussed often is that it's pretty clear the people who got in first get the most gains. With gold, you can't do anything about that until you invent time travel. With BitCoin, as soon as you realise that, you have an incentive to spin up your own cryptocoin with the only difference being that you get in first. Other people have an incentive to get into your cryptocoin speculating that they can be in first, and then because they are in they have an incentive to hype it to others.

https://coinmarketcap.com/all/views/all/ I clicked "load more" until I saw 1400 cryptocurrencies, if Bitcoin is 12 years old, that's averaging a new cryptocurrency every 3 days since Bitcoin's creation. There's probably a lot more than that.