Right. So Queen Isabella can pawn her gold jewelry to finance Columbus’s voyage west. The gold jewelry functions both as a display of wealth and a store of wealth. Unlike, say, Montezuma drinking 60 cups of cacao every day, where ostentatious display of wealth means consuming your cacao bean money. Not that Montezuma didn’t have piles of gold as well.
Again, though, even without being worried about electrical conductivity, gold has physical properties other metals do not.
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Gold is, in most contexts a human being will encounter, totally inert. It never dissolves or corrodes. So it lasts forever - unlike, say, silver or copper, which corrode and get ugly.
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It’s easy to work with, almost unbelievably malleable. Consequently, as pointed out, it’s almost endlessly divisible (amking it useful as money) and remarkably easy to apply to jewelry and knickknacks and suck.
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It’s easy to tell if someone’s cheating you because gold (if you’re not an idiot) is very easy to tell from other metals.
Yes, it’s beautiful, but what makes it so centrally valuable is that it’s indestructable. Anything else you can think of that carries value can rot or break or corrode or dissolve or whatever and lose value. Gold can’t. You can change its form, divide it, do anything to it and still reconstitute it back into the gold you had before.
Perhaps not curious at all:
I did some contract work* for a company who’s business was built on recovering silver from photo processing labs. They sold/leased the equipment to the labs, sold consumables and/or support contracts, then charged a disposal fee to take the captured silver (considered hazardous waste) then reclaimed the captured silver, and sold that either as ingots, technical products (sputtering targets and such) or via a side business which made jewelry (finished, and unfinished) out of it. They work with several other precious metals, but the photo-lab silver business is their mainstay. The recovery process was pretty cheap, even if the photo-labs hadn’t been paying for it. If the labs ever got organized, they could probably charge for the privlege of cleaning up thier waste!
So while the film does to some extent compete for the silver, it also serves to feed silver on to the market. When you consider that profit was being made on the waste disposal angle, it is not hard to imagine that this route served to depress the market price of silver.
*My work involved an angle for them to capitalize on digital photography.
It’s an easy bar-bet to win a beer if you ask “What is the best conductor of electricity?”
Most people will answer gold, but silver is far and away the best. There are some who claim that above-ground deliverable silver (that is .999 fine “good delivery” bars that are acceptable for COMEX) is much rarer than gold, and they might be right.
Photography use has declined considerably of course, but silver is used in tiny amounts in virtually all electronic and aerospace applications these days, which takes up a lot of the slack. Most of it is virtually unrecoverable.
“far and away the best” might be a bit of an exaggeration. Silver is the best conductor, but only slightly better than copper. Some resistivities (of the pure elements):
silver - 1.62 μΩ-cm
copper - 1.683 μΩ-cm
gold - 2.44 μΩ-cm
Silver has other desireable properties, of course, which may make its use attractive in various applications. However, things like wiring very high end audio components entirely in silver is of questionable benefit.
No, no no that’s just silly. I swear I’m in the wrong line of work (cables and speaker wire) But silver is apparently the “indispensable metal” in that in many applications there really isn’t any substitute. Not a cheaper one anyway. Virtually all the gold ever mined is still around. Supposedly, all the gold in the world mined would fit on the floor of the wheat pit at the Comex, or another way of looking at it, on a standard sized tennis court. Other metals - silver, copper, nickel, lead - are consumed more or less in varying amounts and are pretty much lost to delivery or whatever for futures markets. It is interesting that silver is seeing more applications for high tech, but never mind gold or silver, it sure looks like copper and nickel, molybdenum and uranium were the place to be the last five or ten years.
How does one take delivery on uranium futures 
Ah. So it’s the gold standard.