Trade rates

[ceselb]

If you can find a place that has what you need and needs what you have you're all set. That is the single largest problem in a barter economy.
My current record string of trades is at 5 steps. I hate gathering restrictions, but I have to admit they can get trade in, though most probably won't bother.

[Arlequin]

A sea trader with a galleon, just picking anything for a benefit, regular resources from 150% to 110% the gathering rates with best machines. He only does 1:1 trades if he's buying iron or steel, those are good values to keep in the cargo. The argument he uses is that people can give him the resource they value less. For example, many have piles of resources that townfolk gathered over time and have little use. They can be valuable in other ports.

Actually, the big piece of his benefits come from spice trading. He did a long journey overseas and became the first spice trader in that area. He's selling 10 grams bits of exotic spices all around for insane prices.

[marginoferror]

If currency weren't so absolutely painful to handle, and if commodities were more realistically implemented, we would be able to develop a good monetary system. As it is, iron and steel are "good enough" as currency because they are much, much easier to handle than individual coins. In real life, of course, you can't trivially split iron ingots down to the gram and then combine them again when you want to build something. And in real life you don't have to go through like three steps (even more painful during lag) to trade each individual coin in a transaction.

[Kabanahut]

I was just wondering, for all the traders out there, what rates do you go by?

for example, Non-tool or tool for trading gathered resources
and when trading resources for items, do you factor in laybor and tools? and if so how do you figure the total cost.

just curious

That is something that you need to figure out yourself in character.


That in no way was meant to be mean or rude. That is how this game works. In character stays in character. Out of character stays out of character. The two are not to cross.

I completely understand. I have a trader.. and I do all right. I was just asking for gee wizz factor. And not to be rude myself, but how come there always has to be that one post telling you to figure it out in game?

Everyone knows, or should kow not to meta game. If my cherrie is dumb as a rock he'll take any offer handed to him.. if he's smart he'll do a little haggling.

[Sekar]

Currency isn't terribly bad to handle, so long as you use the coins section of the inventory. But it could be better.

[Money]

Bigger values help.

[Trezker]

Yeah, a coin should be worth like, a whole inventory full of iron. Another coin should be worth 10 inventories and one of the cheaper coins just a kg.

Basically coins are supposed to save you the trouble of carrying huge amounts of raw materials.

But in order to get a currency off the ground I think it needs to be based on some resource. The guy giving out coins in the first place should take it's value in iron or what other resource he bases the currency on. Then guarantee that when people give him coins he will hand out the value in raw resource again.

This is something the modern world in reality has strayed way far from so american dollars no longer represent any respectable amount of gold...

[nacistas]

i tried making coins. different metals, different values. but it never took root. cantr is simply not mature enough for money to be introduced. there is too little characters. noone cares about coins. if a char trusts another char, he makes the trade, and gives a credit if a needed good is missing. a credit is just a word. no need for any contracts or coins. and if they dont trust, the trade will not happen. just as simple as that. it is just a game, you know. many people just sleep and eat carrots and dont care about nothing. i even tried making coins from iron. just like in real life, the first coins were from gold, because gold was valued. coin was worth as much as the coin weight. but it still didnt work out, because in this case none bothered to take coins. everyone took pure iron, because it is still the most used recorce

[Arlequin]

There's an elaborate coinage project going on in the forests of the Spanish Island since 1940. The only problem is that after you cut off the strangers, the sleepers, the mules, and the people that never remember that they are carrying money, you aren't left with much.

Gold, steel, iron and copper coins are made for 5, 2, 1 and 1/2 the fixed rates (based loosely on the day of work). A family supports the business, they keep registries of the coins given away and things the customers have deposited, and help to build new exchange offices. It's set out of town to avoid local governments messing with it.

[marginoferror]

nacistas, currency implementation is an extremely delicate and difficult process. The fact that currency is inconvenient to handle in bulk in Cantr, that it takes too much work to mint coins for small denominations, that raw materials are already perfectly divisible and perfectly fungible and that there is unlimited quantity of any resource at any place that produces it makes this even more difficult. I wouldn't get discouraged if it didn't work out the first time. I have an education in economics and currency and I'm not sure it's even possible in current conditions.

[nitefyre]

I'm actually reading an interesting book, Weatherford's "The History of Money," which recounted how coinnage began in the Lydian Empire. However, the author, an anthropologist, discusses how various other resources from cocoa (the Mayans) to rice (SE Asia) has been used in the place of money. Oftentimes, though, they were used to "round off" a bartered trade, i.e. pay the differential.

From my personal experience, after my characters had accumulated so much wealth, they found it more vital to distribute it amongst their followers or friends they met along the way. Building a positive rapport in offering 'fair' trades or gifts was also important. Not just to the well-established status-quo, but the up and coming townsfolk as well.

My sea faring characters always preferred steel and iron as those quantities were far lighter than the piles of limestone, etc, to make them, giving the benefit of speed.

[marginoferror]

One of the big differences between Cantr and the real world that make currency difficult is that in Cantr, raw materials are perfectly fungible, perfectly divisible and very portable.

Materials are all perfectly fungible in that one kilogram of any material is worth exactly the same as another kilogram of that same material. This may seem obvious, but in fact, in real life that is almost never the case. A kilogram of steel can be any quality from perfect to useless, and it's not always obvious just by looking at it. A more obvious example is diamonds. Let's say I have 100g of diamonds. That can either mean I have a 100g bag of diamond dust, maybe useful in some industries but useless in jewellery. It could mean that I have 100g in 50 chunks of raw diamond that need to be cut (this would be fairly typical in real life, I think). Or it could mean I have a dozen cut diamonds the size of the hope diamond. Even two individual diamonds of the same weight and cut will not be equal.

In real life, materials are not fungible, so it's very hard to trade them (transaction costs are high). Both parties have to inspect the materials, and both have to be skilled enough to appraise them competently. Both parties have to accept some amount of risk that they are being taken advantage of (a 900g ingot of cheap steel coated in 100g of good steel). These problems are reduced if there is some degree of trust between the buyer and seller, as you would expect between a regular supplier and a refinery, for instance (if the trust is broken, the business goes elsewhere). But the whole point of currency is to enable safe trade without trust.

By divisible, obviously I mean that in Cantr you can take a 10kg ingot of steel and give bits and pieces of it to any number of people without reducing the value of the material. In Cantr, materials are perfectly divisible down to the gram (and perfectly recombinable), but *coins are not*. If coins weren't so expensive to make and you could handle multiple coins at once, then this wouldn't be so much the case, but in Cantr the primary cost of, say, copper coins is in fact not the copper but the minting.

By portable, I mean that in Cantr, nearly everything weighs far less than it should. Characters eat 20-something grams of meat a day (which is perfectly nutritious and never goes bad). Wood is harvested at several hundred grams per day, but that's okay because the largest ships in Cantr weigh less than half of one of their passengers. Iron is produced altogether at little more than 100g for a day's work, but a road motorcycle frame weighs 2 kilograms and the engine only one more. Less than 1/20th of the weight of one of its passengers (although it can't be brought aboard a ship by any means).

All in all, the big problem with currency in Cantr isn't with currency but with everything else. There's still a reason to use currency - it allows you to store wealth without actually making large amounts of critical resources unproductive, and it allows you to trade without the vaunted "double coincidence of wants" but the utility is lessened so many people don't see the point.

[Surly]

I would contend that the main obstacle to currency in Cantr is that so many people misunderstand the use and reason of money.

A majority of people (not all, by any means) desire currency in Cantr because they have currency in real life, without any understanding of why. Many societies, nay most, have no reason for money. Due to the somewhat unique nature of Cantr, real life models can rarely be applied directly; models should be developed considering all the factors relevant in-game.

Due to the real-world influence, Cantr has struggled to sustain true in-game economies. Currency is not the issue: the issue is, and remains, the lack of economists or people sufficiently interested in the mechanics of an economy to make it work. Therefore, the end is invariably the same: the player that sticks around the longest gets all the resources and economies stagnate.

It's late, I apologise if this was nonsensical.

[Arlequin]

TSC has a point. In Cantr, need doesn't rule over availability. Because there's no urge to reach the goals, many cantrians prefer to wait for a trading opportunity instead of relying in coins.

Also, players are aware of the easy rise and fall of an institution like a bank in a game where people comes and leaves all the time. Cantr life is like the XIV economy during the Black Death. Trade outside the city governments is doomed because, unlike towns, businesses don't have a natural population growth. I guess that's why mid-class arose first within families.

Notice the benefit of coins, more than their weight, is that they always allow you to buy. You don't need to carry the resource that the vendor wants in order to make a trade.

For example, in the pre-coinage society, the scenario:

A has cotton, wants wood.
B has wood, wants iron.
C has iron, wants cotton.

would never produce a trade unless all three met or one of them had reliable information about what the others wanted.

With coins:

A has cotton and coins, wants wood.
B has wood, wants iron.
C has iron, wants cotton.

A buys wood from B for coins. B saves the coins until he mets C, then buys iron for coins. C saves the coins until he mets A, then buys cotton for coins. The result is:

A has wood and coins, wanted wood.
B has iron, wanted iron.
C has cotton, wanted cotton.

B could have accepted cotton for iron, even if he didn't want it, if he knew that C would buy it. But that information can change over time, so B would be forced to reach C as soon as possible to take the trade opportunity, or be left with something useless for him.

I think that, overall, the lack of coin stacking is a minor issue given the advantages and the other problems.