ATM CryptoKingdom gold may make more sense than actual gold. VR worlds are on the rise as the physical world can't hide its costs in blood, sweat and tears. Some woman dangles a diamond in front of me and all I see is a CIA propped warlord, death squads and Nicholas Cage asking, "How do we arm the other 11?"
Popular game currencies have threatened the State enough that
overtly totalitarian States had to outlaw them:
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2009/06/china-outlaws-use-of-virtual-currency-for-real-world-items/And
insidiously totalitarian States in the West have effectively outlawed them by forcing anyone who exchanges fiat for them to be registered money services businesses under the AML clauses in the asinine oxymoronically named Patriot Act.
So yes I agree virtual game currencies have shown promise but so far they lacked resiliency against the State (anonymity, decentralized exchanges, decentralized consensus that can't become centralized, decentralized scaling, etc).
IMHO, TPTB will always have the excuse to get their hands into the "next gen" tech of currency. Anonymity, decentralization etc can be achieved when -atleast- one of the cryptocurrencies you can buy/sell with the rest has those characteristics. -IF it's a free market, and that's a great IF- the people will always come around problems in order to get their job done. What will they have to face, in order to achieve it, is a whole different story...
So, in any case, those ideas are not dead; and frankly they won't be dead when at least one person has the ability and will to do otherwise. It has happened before many times throughout history. I think, there's no reason at all for not happening again in cryptoworld.
If you look at designer drugs, you will see the blueprint. Every time the government has one controlled, the labs (always a few moves ahead) just release the next one. One coin to rule them all is about a good a plan as one drug to rule them all. Let the mother fucker burn--survival doesn't belong to the strongest (network), the fastest (confirmation-time) or the smartest (contracts), it belongs to the most adaptable.