Just because he is doing a kickstarter model and not a bitcoin or opencoin model does not make this a scam.  His identity is public.  It is not a scam.

What do people think of his method of reversible cold storage coins to reduce theft?

This escrow fund system is not going to work.  What it is trying to do is act like a central bank that pegs its currency to the dollar.  Sure the fund can print up more currency to try to bring down the price, just like central banks do, but it cannot just keep on buying up GoldCoins using bitcoins or it is going to go broke.  The value of GoldCoins will be dependent on people's faith in the reserves of the escrow fund, which will be non-existent.  The only way you can get this faith is to have a reputable person or government with a lot of money fund the escrow.  No large backer would ever agree to fund an escrow that uses a fixed adjustment mechanism, because they would be manipulated into being broke.  Read up on what happened to the Thai Baht in 1997, when massive speculative attacks ran the central bank out of reserves and forced it to abandon its peg to the dollar.  Whoever controls the ticker for the price of gold can also manipulate the currency and must be trusted as well.