It may stay nice to look at for a million years, but you can't live on it, keep yourself warm with it, or use it to send emails - all of which I would call forms of utility.
The problem is that that a thousand economists probably have ten thousand definitions of money between them - certainly over time.... "Any economic unit can emit money. The serious problem is to get it accepted" Hyman Minsky
Probably semantics again but what utility has gold?
Among other uses, gold is the material par excellance for coating connectors where low noise performance is required. I designed a connector that terminated 27 pair shielded audio cables into a connector socket with gold plated contacts. I used 80 micro inches RMS gold plating on the printed circuit board that terminated the cable. It terminated the cable for less than $1.00/shielded pair, including both connectors. That was in 1978. That would be over $10/ pair today. There are many commercial uses for gold beyond jewelry. These uses suffer from the consequences of gold also being seen as a de facto store of monetary value when gold prices surge.
Of course the drawbacks to gold as the standard of monetary value include its perverse inability to increase its quantity by a few percent per year. Another (barely) conceivable drawback is that, given that it is a naturally occurring element, it is always possible that some new discovery could vastly increase the quantity of available gold. As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
