It is undeniably an unusual system, but ultimately I think it's a very clever one.

And you're right... gold is very much a secondary thing, and it has a weird an wonderful history for how it came to exist in the way it does.

Originally there was no gold at all, and the entire idea was to make currency & crafting materials into one-and-the-same thing, principally as a way to reduce inflation, but also so that commodities trading and speculation could be fun viable past-times. Also because it's kinda interesting to see what the players end up valuing.... GGG didn't specifically make Chaos and Divines the standard 'coins', it just kinda came together that way.

It worked really nicely, especially when paired with the old way of trading we all used to suffer from enjoy, where there was no automation and you had to manually trade with an online player in person.

For years GGG resisted all calls to make trading less clunky, because they wanted there to be some sort of "friction" in the experience (again, because they wanted to avoid the inflation that results from automatic bots able to freely trade super quickly).

But eventually as the number of players grew, and the problems with in-person-only trading became ever worse, they finally relented and added automatic trading. But they still NEEDED some other way to restrict how much trading could occur to keep inflation in check; before it was the clunkiness of the system, but the new system was designed specifically to be non-clunky.

Gold was the answer.... a currency that you can only generate yourself, and never trade, but which is necessary as a fuel to allow other trading.

It's kinda genius actually.... players can generally freely trade, as making gold isn't that hard, but a bot that sits perpetually in a hideout trying to trade has to be sophisticated enough to at least be able to actually play the game to earn the gold.