Yes, gold is very similar, but it has the benefit of being centuries old and not dependent on complex infrastructure.

Specifically, there is value in a global peer to peer and agreed upon standard of exchange of a guaranteed scarce resource that can't be double spent, such as gold and some cryptos.

Imagine a war, a natural catastrophe, societal collapse or upheaval.

You have to pack up, go elsewhere, or you're suddenly occupied.

Basically you have to ask yourself, what's more likely to be worth something in the future or elsewhere that I can park my money into until I need it?

Since Gold has such a history of being accepted by various cultures and people around the world, and it is very resilient, it doesn't require power, infra, computers, nodes, won't get easily destroyed to environmental incidents, can be stashed away for centuries without degrading, etc. It is arguably more likely to still be used as an exchange of value in the future.

Crypto, well, you have to be specific, let's say Bitcoin BTC, how likely is it that your wallet on your hard drive if you migrate from a war and find yourself in a new world order at the other end of the world, you can still use them to trade for goods/services and they're worth close too or more of what they were before?

It's hard to predict, but arguably it seems less resilient than Gold and therefore less likely for it to hold its value over time. That said, it may still appear better than USD, Euros, or shares in some company, etc.

That's why people say BTC is a "store of value", like gold. You use it to stow away value for when you need it later (even generations later), because it appears to be good at holding value even through geopolitical shifts, passage of time, and so on.

But, if people aren't actually using it for storing value, but instead for speculative bets, it means they are taking money out of it and not leaving it in, it becomes volatile, and volatility is a bad "store of value", because when you might need the value if it's at a "low" it's gone, and it failed at the use case.

If you go outside BTC, it becomes even less likely the other cryptos are good stores of value, and more and more they become speculative bets and a game of chicken.

And even BTC has high volatility and is used for speculative bets a lot. And gold isn't immune to his either.

There's no good answer here, nobody knows the future for sure, but that's the idea.

When people defend crypto as a store of value, now you know what they mean. They're basically hoping it'll hold value through borders, time, and so on.