There were ideas in the past of making cryptocurrencies that would try to somehow stick to fiat prices, but the idea tended to get shot down.
The Brits and the Canucks, however, actually tried it, with UKB (United Kingdom Britcoin) and CDN (Canadian Digital Notes).
Unfortunately though it did indeed fail to work. It just didn't turn out to be practical to try to push the value down to be one to one par with fiat, maybe because fiat can be printed in arbitrary quantities whereas UKB and CDN, like BTC, are limited to only 21,000,000 total quantity of each.
However, I have started keeping archives from which to generate HTML tables (
http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html ), and looking at those tables it seems to me that maybe being one for one exchange against fiat might not be as important as simply being pretty darn stable in value, albeit, it seems, with a slow drift upward in value.
I think if people want to specifically hedge against, or long, or short, a specific type of fiat the
Long+Short baskets idea might work, but where the concern is really about volatility rather than the exchange rate versus a specific individual fiat currency, simply using something a lot less volatile than BTC, yet that is not fiat, might suffice?
-MarkM-