Your service is really no different than going through a goldmoney or Bullionvault. Except the property records are stored on the blockchain instead.
Telling me how secure the vault is, is like telling me how secure a bank is. In crisis banks will collapse so you're better off storing value on a blockchain and in crisis gold confiscation is highly likely and vaults will be the first to be targeted. Not that you shouldn't have some PM's in vaults in safe jurisdictions around the world but I want a decentralized option too.
Currently BitGold & Silver track the value of spot. So you'd have to sell for BTS and then use that to buy physical with Bitcoin but the dealer partnerships are in the pipeline, there's also discussion of BitSilverEagle that tracks the value of silver eagles from major coin dealers.
Again the key here is centralised counterparty risk. The selling point of crypto is being able to store value in a decentralised way, BitShares lets you do that, all other options including yours have centralised counterparty risk.
The property records double as a digital representations of bailment receipts- they are trustlessly (ie without escrow) tradeable p2p in a decentralized way on the blockchain and not tied to specific owners.. No entity can prevent trading of the token on the blockchain and no single party can screw with the ledger. Existing PM dealers would benefit from simply adopting blockchain tech into inventory systems
To quote from an article here:
http://prestonbyrne.com/2014/08/24/what-goes-up/In the case of a substantial fall in value of BTSX, BitAssets will be under-collateralised and will start trading under par as they (being BTSX derivatives, and not actual assets) will not entitle the holder of the in-the-money side of the trade to obtain sufficient USD on settlement to actually recover the expected dollar equivalent of what they are entitled to under the contract. The collateral pool will, at some point, run out of firepower. Price-fixing through unilateral delegate intervention will result in market failure as mispriced trades will be unable to find a counterparty. Nobody is going to spend $1.00 to buy BitUSD which they will only be able to dispose of for, e.g., $0.25.
Irrespective of supply-side intervention through the “DAC” (printing new BTSX/BitAssets or removing them from circulation), if the market abandons the platform in a “black swan” event (which to date virtually every single cryptocurrency in existence, including arguably Bitcoin, has experienced) depositors, investors, and BitAsset holders alike would, in my view, incur substantial losses. These losses would arise not only from the collapse in the value of the BitAssets themselves as described above but also from the fall in value of the BTSX collateral which is locked up in these transactions, as against a reference unit of value with an independent existence outside of the BTSX ecosystem (USD/Bitcoin/whatever).
No asset rises in price forever, including BTSX. To think otherwise is folly. The relevance of the issue is that BitSharesX does not benefit from protections available to users of deposit-taking banks or other financial institutions, such as guaranteed deposits or claims in insolvency. If BTSX collapses, unless the laws of economics have somehow been suspended, depositor value may evaporate without any recourse being available.
No I don't think a black swan type fail or gold confiscation is strongly likely in the near term horizon. I wouldn't use either of those are arguments to avoid trading on Bitshares or via DTT, especially with the relative amounts we are talking about right now, but they are possibilities.
Not slating BTSX' interesting ideas- Both systems are taking different approaches. Some people want decentralized derivatives, some people want tangibility- proof-of-physical existence. There are pro's and con's and potential risks with both..both systems are an evolution from what we already have.