Owning refined gold is usually done for the wrong reasons.
Buying low, selling high appeals to many it's about the same as "investing" your money at a craps table in 'Vegas.
Buying to hold because gold (or any precious metal) has never been worth zero....and perhaps you believe inflation will continue and accelerate....there's some sense in that.
But gold leaves footprints. FDR once outlawed private ownership of gold and folks were required to turn it in for $32.00/ounce regardless what they might have paid for it.
Sale of gold through commercial channels is tracked. Any sale at a profit attracts capital gains taxes. From the moment a commercial facility refines raw gold there's a footprint just waiting to be taxed. Set up as neatly for confiscation as a registered gun.
OK, so that probably won't happen. Just like FDR never took out after people's gold.
So what's safe?
Concentrate. Independent miners are positioned to be the winners. Most are not equipped to refine gold to ultimate purity. They work the ore down to a highly concentrated form then send it out for refining. At that point there's a footprint. There are records of who owns what. If they refine only what they need for the near term and keep the concentrate then there's no record. Nowhere.
Big mining companies can't do that but they wouldn't even if they could because they need to divvy up with shareholders. Independent small miners can sit on concentrate indefinitely or can sell it for cash, no checks, no credit cards, and definitely no records. No record even that it ever existed. Legal? No. There's the reason you won't see gold concentrate being hawked on FOX or CNBC or CNN or even PMSNBC. Not yet.
Now you figure it out from there.