Recent events demonstrate why digital gold won't work:
The SEC is prosecuting Paxos for issuing stablecoins as BUSD. Paxos was licensed and regulated in New York under its BitLicense.
1: If regulated digital dollars aren't safe, who would trust gold?
2: Paxos' BUSD reserves are held in cash and Treasuries, so they are easy to redeem in a panic. Gold in a vault is much slower to convert to cash, so panic redemptions could depeg it and collapse the price.