You missed a big advantage of gold: for most of human history, gold was the densest material known to man by a wide margin, making it very easy to verify that a piece of purported gold is real.
Is there some kind of law that consumer electronics have to have a terrible UI? It’s pretty much just smartphones and computers that don’t totally suck.
Sounds like the NPR model of funding. Even if you can get everything else to work, you still have a couple of weeks every year when you can’t go anywhere without having to stop and listen to Nina Totenberg lecture you 20 minutes about how important it is for everyone to pitch in as much as they can afford.