Great, and I agree, it should be backed by something like gold (or water.) My original reply to this thread was to the OP, Russell (BroadPerspective), not you. 
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In my mind, the digital ‘gold/silver’ is more like bitcoin than the physical metals. The fact I’m calling them ‘digital gold/silver’ is only because of the symbolism I’m trying to put into the concept. It wouldn’t necessarily be fiat, as they would literally be given away. Remember, this is only a marketing idea to pump up interest and participation in the network. These digital token would be functional and mathematically limited so they could actually be used as money, but it wouldn’t be an attempt at setting a new must-use type of money.
OK, I think if it is just a marketing thing, then sure. But if it had actual real use as “a new must-use type of money” then I could see it doing better with the libertarian type crowd. Most of those (me included) are not swept up in the latest fad or marketing ideas… but want real world numbers and facts. LOL. I like your thinking though, as I see a lot of libertarians embracing maidsafe just from what it represents and can do. But again, won’t be taken in by marketing hype as much as the average person. IMHO.
To me it just seems overly complicated. I’m a precious metals guy but I don’t think it’s a great idea to have gold backed crypto. I feel like it’s worthless to have it backed by gold if it’s not redeemable at convenient locations. It obviously adds a significant cost to have many locations storing gold and processing exchanges with crypto. This removes the main advantage crypto has with extremely low cost storage and transactions.
Gold is a physical representation of money and is still the ultimate money right now. It’s the only unencumbered asset that is held by central banks and is tradable almost anywhere in the world. Virtual gold to me is a joke because the advantage of holding gold is that it is actually real money and does not need to be processed by computers or linked to an account. Ownership is physically holding it and it is not dependent on any system working.
To me the utility of crypto and precious metals are vastly different and both are good to hold onto.
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Peter Schiff’s bank accepts bitcoin through BitPay, and you can have gold and silver backed accounts with them. I don’t know if you can get closer to mix these two at the moment.
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I like the Robin Hood thing and how the initial calculations start with an equal allotment of resources to all. I just wanted to point to one analogy that may be amusing because I likely don’t belong in this thread.
The situation with gold reminds me of what is happening with oil with regard to transport or redeem-ability. Even supposing the abiogenic petroleum genesis hypothesis where petrol is not a comparatively limited resource oil still has to be transported almost like gold has to be transported to be physically redeemable.
So here is the analogy. Oil never really was satisfactory and neither was gold . Oil and gold have to found, extracted, processed and transported, stored, protected and externalities paid for and in the case of oil exchanged for value. In the actual transport industry (oil mainstay) oil is facing light powered electric cars. There is no finding the resource, you just slap on a solar roof on wherever you’re at. With light powered cars there is no longer any storage issue or even transport issues (i.e., Tesla’s new Powerpak or now mainstream superconducting grid power conduit.) Its also already distributed in that people have roof tops and its solid state and comparatively clean. And now gold with crypto gold is meeting its light powered car equivalent.
Our mediums of exchanged used to be tracked at the gross physical level now they are being tracked at the quantum or digital level. It could be virtual gold in a video game we now have systems of value and exchange that are a lot more virtual but still retain those qualities we find so attractive like fungibilty.