Money and Trade System

[Erik_the_Blue]

Purses just make you a bigger target for thieves. Trade still requires some form of trust and security.

[Jackard]

Irrelevant - we were discussing the value of coins, not the mechanics of trade. Convenience is all coins need to become useful.


Already posted my thoughts on trade: viewtopic.php?p=16301#p16301

[Junkfist2]

Purses are all well and good, but two things:

If coins are worth only their material value, then the same mass of a bar and the coins it produces are of an equal value. Being able to fit a greater amount of wrought into a bag because they're in coin form creates artificial value of coins, by artificially (and magically) decreasing its size. People would smelt down iron into coin shape, transport it in its "compacted" form, then remake it into iron at their destination.

Also, it doesn't fix the central problem: If coins are only worth what material they're made out of their only worth is as that material. Without minting we still don't really have "coins", we have small metal discs the size of them.

[Laremere]

/rant

Look bub, I have clearly told you even if your argument were valid that it's not happening, because the devs have very, very, very clearly stated their opinion on this mater and as they are the ones designing and making the game, their word is final. So you now you should drop the issue and stop resorting to personal attacks, which are quite pathetic anyway.

Coins will come into use more when more coins can be stored in ones inventory, the game's population grows, and specialization becomes more viable/necessary.

If coins are only worth what material they're made out of their only worth is as that material.

This is was the devs want.

Also, your coin pressing to transport idea falls to the wayside when you realize that you only get 99 coins when making them, so you'll have extra.

[Erik_the_Blue]

Every object becomes more useful when they can be shoved into a cloth Tardis, hammerspace, etc., but coins have more uses than trade.

[Junkfist2]

Look bub, I have clearly told you even if your argument were valid that it's not happening, because the devs have very, very, very clearly stated their opinion on this mater and as they are the ones designing and making the game, their word is final. So you now you should drop the issue and stop resorting to personal attacks, which are quite pathetic anyway.

Coins will come into use more when more coins can be stored in ones inventory, the game's population grows, and specialization becomes more viable/necessary.

LINK ME to it.

Hell, I don't even know if you're disagreeing with me anymore. If you don't, say you don't and stop playing junior moderator yes-man to a concept you don't agree with. I can't even tell from what Jorb/Loftar said what their stance is.

If they're against "artificial" value of coins, there's absolutely no artificiality in minting. It's entirely market-based and player driven. Base material value still matters and they can be smelted down if they depreciate. The only thing that changes is players have the ability to start up an actual currency/trading center/town and not tossing around 1/99ths of bars. That's not a monetary system, that's bartering with bits of metal.

If they're making coins magically take up less inventory space when they are supposed to be worth their own material and cannot ever be actual minted coins but forever will be 1/99ths of bars (somehow this is what you say the Devs want vOv) to increase their value, that is in and of itself an artificial value assigned to them. Not just artificial, *magical*

Also, your coin pressing to transport idea falls to the wayside when you realize that you only get 99 coins when making them, so you'll have extra.

Oh no I transported 100 bars and only got 99 back. ~waysided~

[Frelock]

I think the fact that utility is the only standard of value may be the problem with coins in their current state. Let's look at historical currencies. Most ancient civilizations used gold and silver to make coins. Why? Well, the first is that both are rare enough to stop mass inflation due to a sudden influx. However, what made gold a metal that was valuable? It couldn't be made into weapons, or armor, or support buildings, or really do anything useful; it just looked pretty. If you're stuck out in the wilderness, you'd probably rather have a steel knife than a bar of gold.

I'm no historian, so correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that the reason why gold made such a useful currency is that it would be near pointless to melt it down and use it for something else; except in the case of jewelry, which also had no utility, and was difficult to produce, therefore worth much more than the coins used to make it. Minting coins of specific weights and placing a seal on them allowed people to trade without the need for balances, which could be faked by the owner. They were also easier to carry than goods, and thus we get societies trading in coins.

Let's also look the example of western gold rush boom towns. People there traded mainly in gold dust, not coins or bank notes. But why? People had no practical need for the dust. The only reason they used it as currency was because they could trade it away for useful things, to people who would haul it back east where gold actually had some worth for the material's sake. This would be the equivalent of NPC's taking coins in exchange for useful equipment.

Again, I am not a historian or an economist, so I have no idea if my ideas are right or not. Currently, in H&H, utility is the only standard of value that we have. If you smelt bars into coins, you lose 1/99 of the bar's utility. Therefore, you are losing value every time you smelt some coins. If we were to introduce some resource into H&H which didn't have any immediate utility that was easy to carry around, say gold, we *might* see an economy developing around that system. Of course, I have no idea if that would work or not. We'd have to see some value in the material besides its utility. People would have to agree upon it as a standard of trade. It's intensely problematic, and I see no real way in which we could fix it. Perhaps the devs might come up with something; it's their game, after all.

[Erik_the_Blue]

Coins made from copper and alloys like bronze were also common. According to Wikipedia, pure gold and silver coins didn't even show up until the seventh century AD.

I think what everyone here is forgetting is that in reality it is not trivial to work metals. Your typical commoner wasn't melting down every metal they could find and working them into something more useful. The game does not match reality in this respect, so we shouldn't expect the use of in-game coinage to completely mimic the use of real coinage.

Granted, a commoner probably could take some scrap metal to a smith to have it worked into something useful, but the smith is going to want to be paid. With what? Do you really want to negotiate how many loaves of bread the labor should be worth? Money is useful for buying services as well as goods, another point that seems to have been neglected.

I'm thinking that as more skills are added to the game, skills become harder to get, and items have quality values associated with them, we'll see more demand for monetary media. In societies where many people can produce everything possible, barter economies are much more sustainable, and probably more efficient since there isn't any "middle man" (currency) to deal with.

[Junkfist2]

The prettiness factor doesn't really work here. Moreover, if you have a metal you can make coins of but serves no actual, usable purpose in this game there'd be ridiculous hyperinflation within the matter of a week. That's the wonderful bonus of having currency made out of metals that you could smelt down and use is if things were to inflate: they'd hit a point where they'd be worth more as the base metal than they do as a coin. People would cut their losses and the coins would go back to being bits of a bar of material. (I have to hammer this: WHICH IS WHAT THEY ARE RIGHT NOW)

If just anyone turns a bar into a bunch of indistinguishable unmarked coins, they're not coins, they're not a currency, they're bits of a bar with 1/100th gone to waste. You're still just bartering with metal, and wasting some while you do it.

The only thing that would make currency worth a damn is the socially-agreed-upon promise that those coins you have can be readily exchanged for a good you need. Sometimes people do not want metal scraps, but they'll always want the ability to get what they want when they want. That element of money has nothing to do with the material, it has to do with it being worth more than the material because of a promise that it has that ability to be readily traded.

This is what minting and the ability for a local authority to regulate a currency can do for trading, but it can only work if players have the tools to try the experiment, all that takes is a simple Signature Mechanic and maybe allowing a coinpress on its contruction to give the coins it makes a "name" and to make so that the date the coinpress got built on, as Jackard has suggested.

End result: You'd have a "Wrought Iron Goondar" or somesuch in your inventory, you'd right click on it and an info window would pop up, it would read "Crafted by Bob of Gooncastle, CAUG1309" (or whatever "in-game" date it would be when the coinpress itself was built).

That's it, wouldn't want anything else. That would be all you needed for a town to start a real currency. If that's somehow heretical to even consider I'd ask for a serious explanation as to why, considering the benefits this and other Signature Mechanics could provide.

[kobnach]

There's also the problem that coins take up 10 times as much space as the bar used to make them. Between that and the 1% loss, I've never built a coin press, and even when people quote prices in coins, I'll only trade if I can scale the trade up to one of more whole bars.