you can't buy crowns with gold.
however you can give people gold in exchange for them gifting you crown items, only do this with people you trust
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You find another player that is “selling crowns”. Usually something like 1200:1 (1200 gold per 1 crown). So if the item you want is giftable (crates are bugged right now), you can give that player the gold for the cost in crowns (900 crowns at 1200:1 would cost 1,080,000 gold) and then they can use their crowns to gift you the item.
There is no system for that, aside from you giving someone gold and them gifting you the stuff you wanted to buy with the crowns, and ZoS' words saying that is fine without actually implementing a safe way to trade gold for crowns which they absolutely should do.
There are some Discord communities where you can find buyers and sellers. There also some sort of "proctection" available. But yes, ultimately, you are trusting someone on the internet to respect the deal. One of you need to send the gold/gift first.
Since they already said it's OK, ZOS should definitely do something to stop this shady business. There are a lot of scammers out there. Especially in game zone chats. Don't trust those. Discord communities usually have a feedback thread and ranking system which shows which people are trustworthy.