As I understand it, in reality you don't make 'money' investing in gold, because you convert currency to money, and later money to currency.
Gold historically over long-periods of time, has stood the test of time as a store of value.
What does that actually mean?
Well if you put 100k into gold instead of a house, in ten years and sold the gold, in theory you should be able to buy the same house with the amount of currency you get for selling the gold, due to debasement of the currency, appreciation of the house, and appreciation of the gold with a % give︀ or take.
Having said that due to paper gold the gold price is heavily manipulated︁ downwards (for example JPM has a bigger gold short than their entire balance sheet according︂ to a article i read this week).
So this would explain the fact that gold︃ has underperformed currency debasement, over the past 50 yrs, or below par.
The only assets︄ that haven't are 'tech stocks', and 'bitcoin/crypto'.