Well, it was electrum not gold that Vin was burning. And that brings up another question I have - if electrum allows you to see your own future, how does that work as a poor man's atium? Vin seeing her own future would not change anything in the way the Inquisitor sees her, would it? So it wouldn't mess up her atium shadows, if he was burning atium. The only thing it would do is allow her to see what she was about to do or be, which might help her avoid a fatal attack, but I can't imagine it actually combatting atium.
The trickiness with Atium is that if you can see what someone else is going to do, you
change what you are going to do. With just one person burning Atium, that one person is at a huge advantage; they can survive just about any one-on-one confrontation. With two though, there is a feedback effect; when you see someone what someone else is going to do, that changes what you will do, which changes what they will do, etc. Thus there is a mess of shadows showing all the possibilities. The one that really happens is thus essentially just cleverness and free will then.
With Electrum, you get the same feedback effect. You see what you are going to do, which in turn changes what you decide to actually do. If you see yourself dieing, you dodge the blow, which means you move differently, which means the Atium burner sees two different shadows, which changes how he decides to attack, which changes what you see happening to yourself, which means you do something different, which creates more shadows which...
And so on. It isn't nearly as useful as being able to see what your opponent is going to do, but it does mean he doesn't know what you are going to do either. In Vin's case, it was a sensible precaution.
