Here is a small legal fact with large practical consequences.
When you open a gold IRA and buy coins, you do not buy them.
Your custodian does. Using money that belongs to your IRA. From a dealer you selected. Shipped to a depository you never visit.
Your role in that transaction is to point at something and say "that one."
This is not a technicality invented by lawyers to be annoying. It is the entire reason the purchase qualifies as a retirement account transaction rather than a taxable distribution followed by a personal shopping trip.
And once you follow the dollar all the way through, the structure of this industry stops being confusing and starts being obvious.
Let's trace it.