spectacle wrote:outside of rarity
quite right. Outside of scarcity and time investment (i.e. quality in most cases), everything in the game is just an "object".
spectacle wrote:Any gold and silver coins that appear on the market will be quickly taken out of circulation as people use the metal to craft jewelry
Not sure if I buy this, but at any rate it doesn't really get to the point of using coins of lesser base material value to stand for a larger value. Yes, minted gold coins are only useful for trading with a "gold" standard, but using increments of value of < 1 nugget worth of gold, but at that point we might as well stick with a barter economy. I think one of the real benefits of the OPs idea is not as much about getting metal as a material into the general economy, but more to provide an interesting semi-standardized mode of exchange beyond naked bartering for those who don't have access to large quantities of metal.