"despite my strong support for our collective foray into distributed-ledger (blockchain) technology, I'm quite the fan of gold"

Same here man :-)

I think a lot of people here on Steemit look at the blockchain as a means to get free from the slave hood of the current economic system. As you metion that the gold is store if value in true sense of the word 'value'. Now that is id illegal or semi-illegal to use gold as fiat - our minds and genetic memory find this against what we believe. The truth is that gold cannot be copied or artificially created and thus we instinctively trust it.

Blockchain gives us the next best option - the book/ledger is distributed in such a way that it cannot manipulated until each and every node master betrays it. Quite an statistical impossibility.