Excellent points.
One of the things with transacting in gold and silver is that, often, you aren't transacting in the real deal. Under the gold/silver standards there was still a central bank, or authority, that issued notes that were representative of its value in gold/silver. That is not a trustless system, and it's next to impossible to not abuse this system through fractional reserve, and eventually defaulting on the promises of paying the bearer on demand in precious metals in physical form.
That's essentially what happened that brought the gold standard era to an end. At the end of the day, it's all an illusion.
Bitcoin is different. You don't need a central entity in order to transact with it efficiently (as opposed to the bulky nature of precious metals), and intrinsically, there can be no fractional reserve. The fungibility of currency is also preserved much better than precious metals, since purity and weight don't need to be tested.
Thanks, these are good points too! The architecture of money that I envision is: (and BTW this includes 'fiat money', which IMO is in reality a flexible gold standard, if we define the gold standard by its true nature which is the suppression of gold prices to support the issuance of paper money and debt by the elites. Books like 'Gold Wars' and 'The Gold Cartel' have exposed serious evidence of the elites' use of derivatives to suppress gold and silver under the 'fiat' system.)
At the base level, you have hard money like physical gold and Bitcoin which are trustless, anonymous and fungible (and maybe Bitcoin is more convenient than gold, but remember Bitcoin is just code and data, where unlimited new altcoins can be created.)
Above that level, there is central bank money. Central banks of core countries are wise enough not to abuse their power to issue this money too obviously. This issuance is, in reality and over the long term, dependent on the amount of hard money each central bank holds, one way or another.
Above that level, there is debt (or equivalent) issued by major governments and institutions like commercial banks, big corporations and pension funds. The elites in core countries are eager to protect the trust in this 'money' too, but this is not as important as central bank money.
And very roughly speaking, above that level, there all sorts of 'stores of value' which are outer-ring financial assets like stocks, lesser corporate bonds, real estate, etc. These are the least safe, especially at times like these. The elites will protect these when possible, and abandon them when necessary, especially if the crash can be blamed on reasons that don't trace back to the nature of their system, in public opinion. The system tries to portray gold and Bitcoin as being among these assets, when in reality they are different beasts all together.
The outer layers around Bitcoin have not yet been built, and I don't think they will look superficially like those around gold, but they will, and will work essentially the same as those around gold, even though they might be advertised as something totally different in the story for the public.
For example, when it's time to reduce the money supply to control the dollar price of Bitcoin, it won't be the old story that 'we have to live up to our moral responsibility to redeem dollars for the same amount of gold, since only gold is real money.' It will be something like 'Bitcoin prices rising is a sign the public is losing faith in the dollar, and this is followed by disastrous financial crashes, so we must reduce the money supply to restore faith in the dollar.'
In reality, whichever story is used, comes out to be the same thing.