"digital gold" was a line that was made up when the people in charge refused to make the throughput more than a few kilobytes per second. It doesn't make any sense.

Why would people use an illiquid currency when there are others that have the same advantages of being able to use money electronically except for actually being able to make cheap and fast transactions?

If there was a version of gold that fluid and easy to transact with, people would use that instead gold.

There is no reason for bitcoin to exist without transaction throughput except for speculation using IOUs from exchanges.

Bitcoin is a really bad currency: it has pretty wild price fluctuations, and the transaction time for enough confirmations to be secure between two random parties takes a long time.