Because you cannot touch the basis for a currency doesn't make that currency any less real OR valuable.

Actually, gold is literally everywhere. So are osmium, palladium, silver, platinum, iron, radium, thorium, and uranium. Just not in quantities sufficient to make their extraction worthwhile.

Diamonds are artificially expensive, to use one example, because De Beers and the Diamond Market keeps them that way (ask yourself about the Northwest Territories diamonds and ones from South America or, for that matter, Arkansas or Montana). Forbidding private ownership of gold, as Roosevelt did, is silly. Tying the value of a country's currency to an artificial value is as silly as tying it to an artificial anything.

And runs on banks were not by any stretch of imagination rare events!