So? It doesn't pay a dividend. The only way people have made money off of that over the last 14 years is to sell the stock to someone willing to pay more for it than they did. Well I guess you could loan it to a short seller, but for the most part, it has just been a purely speculative asset, same as crypto.

>> gold has both utility and intric beauty

Crypto has utility as well, as the parent post pointed out. Many people suspect that for both gold and crypto, their utility value is tiny compared to their speculative value.