Great blog.
I'm not sure of the merits of pricing in 1oz coins.
People expect to pay a premium the smaller the size of physical you want. So I would stick to the global market price per ounce & just charge a % on that.
The Shanghai Gold Exchange has a high delivery rate & go as low as 1kg bars I think.
Exchanges like them will take over the pricing mechanism in the event Comex and others default.
(Edit: Just saw above, yeah 1:1 would be good, if it was possible, but whatever it is, is probably fine. I think people are more comfortable with the widely quoted price of silver per ounce. A new system with a new price system would be a hard sell I think.)
Unfortunately that widely quoted price is highly manipulated. For every ounce of silver there are nearly 100 ounces of paper silver driving the supply/demand equilibrium way down. We need to decouple from that in order to be of any interest to silver bugs.
The heart of the issue is a gateway. Fiat,gold, silver you could make a case for any gateway but we need one.
I like using e-gold as a example so how did they get started? Well simple really they used their own funds to purchase a large amount of gold(it doesn't say how much) and held that as a reserve. From their you had a physical gold storage to back your e-gold which could be redeemed at any time. Even with this in place it took them 2 years to gain exponential growth.
The other interesting thing they did was when you used the spend feature of egold. This spend function meant instead of shoppers seeing AUG 1gram for a product they would instead see the current USD amount. The receiver would of course still receive egold but from a shopping experience the buyer and seller could use terms they were all ready familiar with and know they were getting that dollar amount.
With the above in mind what would stop someone from buying 50-100k worth of a 1-10 gram bars and exchanging them directly for bitGLD for a spread? If its such a good idea why don't a few stake holders throw their bts in the mix to the tune or 50K with the knowledge that it will make the rest of their shares more valuable. Amagi metals would be the place of choice. So you just convert bts to btc to gld and now you have your reserve. Pay a operator, storage cost and a third party to audit and its gateway made.
Something tells me I am missing something or it isn't quite this simple and their must be a reason no one will bite on this.