If you had a large deposit of gold (or another rare and valuable mineral), enough to establish a universal income based on a gold standard, would it make economic sense to do so? The issues with deflation in economics seem tied principally to centralization and don't seem like they would be inevitable in a different system. Since the cash flow in a centralized banking system is top down, with the central bank loaning to the big banks and those making loans to big business and smaller banks, in a deflationary environment as they control the flow of money and are subject to the same economic behaviours as anyone else end up hoarding the precious resource thus causing economic collapse.
It doesn't make sense though because economic value is generated by business interactions at local levels, and a loan granted to an organization or individual can't be held as valuable until it proves that its successful. The entire system has to treat loans as assets despite them being inherently risky, and as centralized and bureaucratic institutions are notoriously bad at making sensible decisions it ends up strangling economic activity because 1) they don't take risks when they should be doing so because risk has a chance of failure and centralization causes certain actors to be "too big to fail" 2) when they eventually make decisions they do so based on lagging aggregate indicators that don't accurately represent the state of the market and end up being too slow to reap the gains of growth or to dodge the bursting of a bubble
Since the present system of financing depends on very flawed actors making very flawed decisions, money can't get where it needs to go efficiently. Despite advances in technology it fails to empower the individual with the ability to embark on productive and innovative enterprise, instead it impoverishes them to maintain a broken international framework. There has to be some universal unit of credit that doesn't come at a cost to some institution and rewards pioneering action. The success of the United States in its history could be tied to the fact that it had a vast wilderness to explore, full of resources to feed growth for those daring enough to adventure into it: land, gold, oil, paying the dividends needed for ingenuity in railroads, manufacturing, electronics. Individual success, not self-serving managers, brought the greatest level of prosperity in the history of the world. And there's yet more to attain, if we had but the gut and a muscle of wealth to pursue it.