I'm actually trying to convince people that, if we accept the premise that blockchain technology can create digital gold (as the market has, to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars) then we should harness that digital gold to protect the value of the money that everyone already owns, rather than setting the world on fire by launching new currencies that function like pyramid schemes.

While noble, your digital gold is worse than usd not being fully backed by gold though. There is no intrinsic value in a database of hashes in the event that a currentcy fails. This solution is as much a fiat solution, if not more so than usd. The gold standard was as much if not more about securing the value of money as it was about controlling inflation as a result of over printing.

There's two nuances I would respectfully suggest that you're overlooking.

First, KRNC is designed to be employed as a supplement to USD. Most transactions would be executed with both USD and a corresponding blockchain asset. Technically, this is a digital analogue of the "symetallic standard", in which base money is comprised of both gold and silver in a specified ratio. The point is risk diversification: if fiat money implodes, or if crypto fails, you aren't wiped out.

Second, the concept of "intrinsic value" is misleading/confused when it comes to money. Things that trade at their consumption/production value are not monetized. Treating something as money involves attaching symbolic value to it: accepting it as proof of goods or services rendered in the past, and as a token that can be used to acquire goods or services in the future. Even gold would lose most of its value if it were suddenly priced based only on demand for use in industrial applications.

Money has always been valuable because everyone else treats it as money, whatever it is. It's a Schelling point that enables abstracted barter. Nothing less, nothing more.