Decentralized

Beyond having no central issuer: it distributed itself all over the planet, hid itself in different spots to keep being found and mined all through history, even went beyond the planet (so if it all ends up in one person's hands someone else could just dump the market with asteroid mining)

You said don't compare it to Bitcoin but it's more decentralized than Bitcoin - it doesn't require any changes to be used as a multi-planet currency at the same level of convenience it has on a single planet

Decentralized but effectively controlled with paper, AML and social norms.

It is definitely decentralized. How decentralized is debatable, but there is definitely enough above-ground gold spread around in enough hands to consider it decentralized.

Gold's problem is portability. This is why paper gold became a thing in the first place. It is far more convenient to trade IOUs for gold than to trade the actual asset. Yet, no one will see this as a problem so long as most aren't trying to turn in their IOUs for the real thing.