When I think of the "properties" of gold I don't think of how the price behaves, but rather that the total supply of it is limited (though Bitcoin actually does a much better job at limiting supply, since gold'll keep being mined for a long time and the supply is hard to predict) and that, other than theft, there's no way for someone else to take it from you (compare to eg money at a bank that can collapse or in a stock of a company that can go bankrupt)