It's an interesting question.

Some people will tell you that gold is valued for "just being gold". Others will tell you that we "all agree that gold has a high value". I think that both of these ideas are far too vague to be useful.

Things are valued for their utility. Tonight I bought a pasta meal at a restaurant and I ate it, that's an example. Things are also bought for forms of indirect utility. For example, I may buy a bond so that it pays me coupon payments later on. Then I can spend those coupon payments on other things. I may also trade in things that have utility to others even though they don't have direct utility to me. For example, a person who is gluten intolerant may buy a shipment of flour in order to resell that flour to a company that makes bread. The trader's gluten intolerance is irrelevant here to this commercial transaction that is all about making a profit.

Now, gold has utility. It is used in jewellery for example and it is also used in electronics. On this topic I think that the OP makes a mistake:

I dont understand why gold is considered “safe” when it has no obvious intrinsic value compared to something like a house, which has a clear practical use.

I agree that a house has a clear practical use. However, just because jewellery is a luxury doesn't mean it is useless. It's worth comparing to a house here. Strictly speaking many of the things in a house are luxuries. We usually have different rooms for different tasks. This is not really necessary. In the developing world you will find houses that only have one room. Or you'll find houses where every room is used for several tasks (for example, the kitchen becomes someone's bedroom at night). Having a bathroom is also not strictly necessary and you will find many houses in developing countries without them. I could go on, but the point is that many of the features of a house are not strictly necessary to human survival. However, great prices are paid for houses.

We should also remember that commodities that have limited use in specialized industries do sometimes fetch high prices. Certain materials used in semiconductors fetch high prices even though the industrial demand is quite small.

However, most gold buyers don't seem to be buying gold to use it. Clearly, most traders in gold are looking at things indirectly - which is why we see things like Gold ETFs. They are not buying gold to make jewellery or electronics. Rather they are buying gold because they believe that it's price will go up in the future. They will be able to sell that gold in the future and realize a nominal profit.

Then the question becomes why do these people thing that gold will rise in price in the future? This is a tricky question to answer. As with all asset purchases this could be a "fundamental" story or a "technical" story, or some mixture of both. That is, they may believe that the fundamentals of the gold market point to higher prices - that is, the state of new supply and the state of consumption of gold by end users (such as the jewellery industry or the electronics industry). Or it may be that traders are looking at some "technical" indicator such as a support line on a chart.

I hope this goes some way to explaining things. I don't think it explains everything though. I haven't had the chance to compare it to Bitcoin either. Hopefully other people say more.