In such a half-collapsed hypothetical economy (great term for it, btw), other metals would be way more valuable. Specialized steels, nearly-impossible-to-produce-without-massive-electricity aluminum, copper for cooking; all have more practical value than gold in a bumped-back-to-the-18th-century future.
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i think they must believe that if they can convince everyone else that gold ( or crypto ) has value, then they win. because they had the beanie baby first it will have been the cheapest for them, and they make out ahead.
i suspect they know it’s a pyramid scheme. just one that they’re hoping to win
doomsday scenarios where all their enemies die and they can pretend their guns are useful i think is somewhat a social marker… communicating them as being fascists and therefore trustworthy to all of the other doomsday prepers
they don’t necessarily need to “believe” the apocalypse is coming, happily fantasizing about it is enough. but they do want to get rich quick in the meantime
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Most of them haven’t worked out that capitalism is dependent on the government.
Maybe some of them have, and what they are doing isn’t pretty. Liberty for me, totalitarianism for you, that kind of thing.
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And - to emphasize what you and others have pointed out upthread - those niches that care about the electrical properties of gold will be among the first to vanish in any sort of market collapse where dollars are worthless.
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Belief in gold as some sort of pricing standard is the equivalent of the nineteenth century physicist’s belief in the aether, a sort of reference point against which the universe moves. Like the aether, it’s ultimately a nonsense idea for exactly the same reason; prices, like inertial frames of reference, are all relative.
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Oh, they would sell their own mother in the shadow of a mushroom cloud.
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Hell, even difficult to manufacture but mundane items like pencils would be more valuable than gold in such situations.
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Well, things like food maybe?
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Depends. In all of the SF scenarios there is always at least one story about how “good people make good food” IYKWIM
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Canned beans? Let’s not be hasty…
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… hey give me your money I’ll “invest” it for you 
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One thing that could make the ‘value’ of the sorts of useful but substantially reusable and nonperishable materials you mention a bit wonky would be that, if post green revolution agriculture and its various industrial suppliers and downstream handling and processing systems don’t survive whatever takes out contemporary metallurgy, there might well be a lot of people who don’t need their aluminum anymore.
Depending on the speed and distribution of whatever The Collapse you are positing you could really see a lot of weird inversions of perceived value anywhere that shortages of perishables and consumables start to bite before those of nonperishables and durables.
Agriculture is one of those things that I don’t think would take much of a hit. Yes, factory farms are massively productive thanks to machinery and fertilizer, but we also have tremendous knowledge about crop rotation, composting, and other compensatory technology. Frankly, we would have a healthier world if we reduced monoculture and one-way fertilizer extraction. It would just be more labor-intensive and more seasonal. Folks who were doing things related to entertainment and high tech would need to do farm labor in order for us to collectively survive. Oh, well. I’m good at growing things and turning them into tasty food and beverages!
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I’d agree that agriculture is a fairly promising sector in terms of how well it would go if it had to be retooled into some sort of late pre-industrial with select contemporary innovations state; I’m just not sure how quickly that retooling could occur, relative to the continued demand for food objects, if it happened under a ‘The Collapse’ scenario rather than the (probably rather more likely; but not what the goldbug preppers have in mind) “you know, those price trends in petrochemical inputs aren’t going to start looking any better if you just wait…” gradual pressure to adopt alternatives.
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One of the things that sends me reeling about all of this is how wildly Guilfoyle and Governor Newsom’s paths have diverged since the divorce. Like, wildly divergent. 
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Everybody was shilling something at CPAC this year. It was like one big infomercial occasionally interrupted by politics of grievance.
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I’ll be over there brewing beer…
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For sure!
Also a lot of non-metals that people take for granted. The example I always give is one that post-apocalyptic fiction again always gets wrong- coffee. I love Walking Dead, but ten years into the apocalypse, they are still drinking coffee.
It’s symptomatic that people don’t appreciate how much of an elaborate global supply chain is required to get us coffee every morning. Those damned magic beans only grow on a tiny part of the planet and a huge network of companies and transportation systems grow it and bring it to every kitchen with phenomenal efficiency every single day. In any kind of societal disruption, coffee (and products like it) would be the first thing to go away. Coffee would be way more precious than gold. You can go get gold particles out of any river right now with a sluice and a lot of patience. Coffee would be gone for a generation if we disrupted it.
I think if people better understood how dependent we are on these complex global systems for the basic things we love, they’d be a little less inclined to contribute to tearing it all down just because they wanna shoot their guns a lot.
Like, hey libertarian bros- we get it, you wanna reboot civilization. But are you willing to completely give up coffee, tea, spices, good whiskey, bananas, all fruit every winter, synthetic fabrics, most plastics, etc, etc, etc? It really grinds my gears how little people appreciate the quality of life that this civilization which they are so eager to destroy has given them.
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I think the salient point is that it is civilisation that allows for anything other than goods of immediate use to be valued.
Whether it is a government backed piece of paper based on gold or some guild, a mystical order of monks or some corporation hoarding gold and handing out IOUs, none of that works without sufficient society to allow a sufficient degree of confidence that this piece of paper, or giant carved rock, or hunk of gold, bunch of squiggles in a ledger or whatever is actually going to enable you to obtain whatever it is you actually need.
There is a whole infrastructure needed for that confidence to exist.
Either you have that society or you don’t.
If you do then fiat currency is fine. If you don’t, then gold-backed banknotes (and even the gold itself) are no use to you either.
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