Anyway you look at it, 2008 resulted in a de facto devaluation of the dollar against gold.
Yes, but then you have to explain the revaluation of the dollar against gold soon thereafter. I don't deny that the dollar was losing to gold in 2009-2011, but it was based on the expectations of the likely (or not so likely) collapse of the dollar system in the coming years rather than on reality. For example, there was no price hyperinflation or anything close to what can be loosely called that. When these expectations didn't come true, the speculative rise of gold mostly retrieved back to the baseline. In other words, it turned out to be only a temporary devaluation.
I try not to speculate on the precise cause of each price movement, at least in this kind of discussion.
In the 70s, gold went from $35/oz (a price set in 1934) to $800 around 1980, and then back down to the $300 level and basically stayed flat. In the mid 2000s, gold went eventually to the $2000 level, and then back down to the $1000 level in early to mid-2010s, and basically stayed flat.
We see a pattern. Gold basically holds flat most of the time, except for step-wise movements up ($35 to $300 to $1000.) But each step up, or devaluation of the dollar, is accompanied by a big overshoot, followed by a big drop. This overshoot-and-drop pattern also seems to hold with Bitcoin (and even more so with altcoins.)
Over the decades, we can formulate a theory *based on these numbers alone* that the dollar is essentially continuously devalued against gold, when the noise is taken out. (And I won't explicitly speculate as to why the noise is there!)
(BTW, we have to look at the pure price of gold in dollars, not 'inflation adjusted dollars,' as you call them. If there's such an asset as inflation adjusted dollars, please let me know and I would love to own it!)
