You can make a decent living buying and selling gold & other "precious" metals, and lots of people do with a lot of work & risk.
As a buy and hold however, you'll probably wind up being disappointed if that is your only holdings for long term growth. Over the past 20 years you would need to have been buying low and selling high at the dips & peaks in order to just keep up with doing the same for other types of investments.
Since 2000, Silver peaked at near $50 / ounce and then crashed to around $10 ounce. Gold peaked near $2000 / ounce then crashed to around $1000 / ounce. Assuming current issues, it's like a long term commodity and it goes up and down, while always worth something, you might find it one day worth less than half of what it was a bit earlier.
It's nice to have Some Gold and silver & other such things as part of future preparations, but balance that out with lots of other stuff.
Trying to pick and choose short passages from a sacred text when you don't believe in anything outside the physical world will tend to be a bit iffy because unless you study it, you'll miss the actual context of the passage.
Nothing wrong with you being happy having your pictured 18 ounces of gold, as long as you have a well balanced stock of land, current legal tender, fuel, medicine, food, weapons & supplies, tools and the other basics of life.
While you and a lot of us on the site here probably have a pretty good idea of what gold is worth to us both buying & selling, you'd be surprised at how so many have no idea including your local grocery store etc (unless they happen to be run by indians or africans, then they know).
Like this guy's videos about gold & silver in public:
Another thing is if I don't know somebody & I don't have a testing kit with me, I may not be interested in somebody's "gold" coin if they seem a bit dodgy, tons of fakes out there. My favourite show dealer usually has at least 1 story per gun show of somebody trying to sell her fake gold coins (technically a forgery crime). They walk off in a huff & try to find some other mark.
