On coins

[octo-bee]

Dear Santa. Please make coins signable. Issuer name and short hashcode to prevent Unicode fraud will be enough.
Having non-counterfeitable item, with effort it will be possible to turn these coins into modern-style money, not just an object of natural exchange.

The following will become possible.
Someone (hearthling or village) issues money with his guarantee that, then asked, he will exchange these "money" for some valuable goods, pearls for example, at fixed rate. After that, he have to be powerful enough to force other hearthlings (villages) to use his money. It may be due his major role in trade, or simply supported by military force. With latter, one can demand contribution in his money, which will lead not only to taxation and griefing, but also will force victim to establish economical connections with his conqueror. And almost certainly if some critical number of hearhlings will start using such money (just coins issued by some guy), their prevalence will become self-supporting, or at least will take less effort to maintain.

What it will definetely not lead to: universal in-game money. Establishing good-for-nothing-except-exchange-medium good in this game is almost impossible, that is for sure. Also it will not change game mechanics.
What it may lead to: monetaristic reasons to start wars; more physical influence of the "empire", not just stupid runestone with "subordinate to Great Rome!" on it; economic bubbles; becoming shark of Wall-Street as goal in game; creating dollar-like money (without support by goods) as one of the highest goals in game.
Why it might not work: with game's exponential economic growth, it can be just too hard to work this out.

Sorry if this english is messy.

[hazzor]

It would be nice to have a standardization. If someone is trading with me, what am i supposed to say aside from, what do you need that will get me what i want, and that seems awkward, if there was something standard and there were general known values that could be bartered depending on village relations i suppose (for example if you saved a village from raiders you might be able to pick up some cheaper goods). It would only really be possible, however, if all major trading factions leaped on the idea at the same, or at least similar time.

[crevank]

Sounds neat

[hazzor]

Sounds neat

yet near impossible i can't help but think

[crevank]

Sounds neat

yet near impossible i can't help but think

Wouldn't surprise me at the least.

[ImAwesome]

what about promisary notes, using prachments and ink just like writing a basic note, but only LS of a village can create them(5 per parchment?). you know which village they belong to and that village would state thier rates before buying/selling. of course this could easilly be abused if a village falls into ruin and a new LS takes over and makes more notes than the village has goods to support(same issue with coins though)...but a basic thing that has been going on in the world for centuries

[MagicManICT]

Any discussion on coins is completely moot without some other major changes to them. Metal is too common or not common enough for coinage (ie iron vs silver/gold). Coins are just too much of a pain in the ass to handle in quantity. How much more or less valuable is a q40 coin versus a q10 coin versus a q90 coin?

Other than for origination purposes, why does anyone care where a coin came from? Even then, what would prevent the person receiving coin (vs the minter of coin) from smelting it down and re-minting.

what about promisary notes

Without an authority to back them or to enforce them, promissory notes are as worthless as the paper they're written on. Since there is no real authority in an Internet game, they are thus worthless. I can pull tons and tons of examples from other online games with proven banking and investing mechanics created by the players that aren't enforced by game mechanics, and in nearly every one, there has been a scam behind the design or a failure allowing a scammer to take a large portion of the assets (large being either in percentages or amount depending on the scam and the target).

[sabinati]

fucking fiat currency

[octo-bee]

what about promisary notes, using prachments and ink just like writing a basic note, but only LS of a village can create them(5 per parchment?). you know which village they belong to and that village would state thier rates before buying/selling. of course this could easilly be abused if a village falls into ruin and a new LS takes over and makes more notes than the village has goods to support(same issue with coins though)...but a basic thing that has been going on in the world for centuries

It is basically the same thing, but the coins are already here. By the way, you actually can do this in game as it is now, but it will need fucking RSA, copy-pasting from game to OS and a gazilllion of tons of headache to explain asymmetric cryptography to everybody on the forum. And parchments are not stackable.

Any discussion on coins is completely moot without some other major changes to them. Metal is too common or not common enough for coinage (ie iron vs silver/gold). Coins are just too much of a pain in the ass to handle in quantity. How much more or less valuable is a q40 coin versus a q10 coin versus a q90 coin?

Sure, if the coin is cheaper than the metal it is made from, nobody cares about coin anymore. This is one of the obstacles to making it work.

Other than for origination purposes, why does anyone care where a coin came from? Even then, what would prevent the person receiving coin (vs the minter of coin) from smelting it down and re-minting.

Basically the same thing that prevents you from using your money as a toilet paper (aside from the fact that bills are too tough).


All the problems that you are mentioning are real, and there is much more of them. The point of this proposal is not to make some sort of in-game currency, but basically to make it possible to try to make in-game currency by in-game efforts. It is nearly impossible, and it is challenge, and it does not make difference if it fails. Just someone may try to do it, just for fun.
And, by the way, this concept is actually present in game, in form of these fucking "trade threads".

[GhostOfZed]

"Today we put in an item 'trade threads', a currency system that completely works and everyone will be happy =3"