You have it backwards. There was no conspiracy to use gold as money over say...tree bark.

Money requires certain characteristics like durability, fungibility, portability, and scarcity, then other tertiary traits like malleability and stability of value.

It turns out there are VERY FEW materials on earth that actually function well as money to fit these characteristics. A small class of metals known as "the noble metals" fulfills these traits better than the other available options, of which gold and silver are a part of.

So why did gold make it to the top? Because the ecosystem we live in is mostly made of nitrogen, oxygen, and water, and gold does not react with any of these elements. This makes it excel at the 'durability' trait required of money because it's just about completely inert.

Silver doesn't react with any of those, but it can tarnish from random sulfer in the atmosphere. The tarnish doesn't really effect it's durability, but it's just not as inert as gold. However, gold is slightly too soft, so silver has an edge in durability in that regard, while also having infinitely more use cases in industry for better intrinsic value.

There's not really a winner take all among the noble metals since silver and gold both have their pros and cons. Platinum wasn't used much money-wise just because it's not very malleable. Then copper (which is SORT of a noble metal ) was added to the mix to try and increase granularity.

Silver is by far the most undervalued at the moment.