Money: The use of coins

[SilkShuffle]

post scarcity society's are not as fun

[Chris]

post scarcity society's are not as fun

There is plenty of scarcity in Cantr. Newspawns arrive naked and empty-handed. They will often be given a few things, but most characters have to work their way up in material terms.

[SilkShuffle]

There is plenty of scarcity in Cantr. Newspawns arrive naked and empty-handed. They will often be given a few things, but most characters have to work their way up in material terms.

And yet character's still reach a point where they literally need nothing. Sure some chars might need to struggle for a decade or two to "make it big" but plenty of places will simply hand you the keys to the kingdom once you've proven your loyalty through a little rp and 2 years of activity. Unfortunately the lack of decay also means the kingdom has huge stockpiles of every resource and tool imaginable and if you run out just break into the house of some dead old person. Decades later you can still find huge piles of stuff in old abandoned houses that no one has inhabited for decades if not centuries.

[masterekat]

But what does it matter if you've got all the tools and resources in the world if you don't have enough awake characters in a given place to use them? I honestly don't believe that decay is going to change anything, except, perhaps, to make it even more difficult for the awake characters to make face to face contact with others in neighboring towns. Coins would be even less likely to catch on if that were the case. Now, give me a way to use all those resources and tools that would "make the game world smaller" in the figurative sense...I could be on board with that.

[Chris]

And yet character's still reach a point where they literally need nothing. Sure some chars might need to struggle for a decade or two to "make it big" but plenty of places will simply hand you the keys to the kingdom once you've proven your loyalty through a little rp and 2 years of activity. Unfortunately the lack of decay also means the kingdom has huge stockpiles of every resource and tool imaginable and if you run out just break into the house of some dead old person. Decades later you can still find huge piles of stuff in old abandoned houses that no one has inhabited for decades if not centuries.

In other words, there is more than one way to become rich. You can follow the rules and be a good group member. Or you can look for opportunities as a scavenger or pirate. I see no problem here.

[FiziKx]

But what does it matter if you've got all the tools and resources in the world if you don't have enough awake characters in a given place to use them? I honestly don't believe that decay is going to change anything, except, perhaps, to make it even more difficult for the awake characters to make face to face contact with others in neighboring towns/

Slightly off topic, but...
Oh dear God. All the tools and resources in the world if you don't have enough awake characters to use them. Story of my life.

In my case, it's not like these people don't have opportunities, it's just that for some reason they have hardly any desire to use these resources and try to make an impact, even though where I'm at, there are huge opportunities to do so.

[masterekat]

In my case, it's not like these people don't have opportunities, it's just that for some reason they have hardly any desire to use these resources and try to make an impact, even though where I'm at, there are huge opportunities to do so.

Exactly! And for one of my characters, he and his colleagues are breaking everything down, basically spoon feeding anyone and everyone who may spawn in or visit that place a way to make use of those piles of resources and still no one takes the bait. So frustrating.

[CrashBlizz]

The coinage system can and does work but it takes a lot of setting up and re-organising for established towns to use it. Towns with single dictactor type leaders will find it easier to implement because there's no discussions over setting of values and you can basically force people/businesses into the system.

Took about 2 RL years for me to slowly set up and introduce one town to it but it worked and worked perfectly (then becuase the character fell asleep for a month or two new leaders came along and changed the system without any clue as to what they were doing or why - hence my perfect system fell apart )

Moral of the story - Yes, the use of coins is fantastic and can make selling/buying/paying a lot easier but any system needs to be fully thought through in a logical way, implemented in the society by an established character and not played about with unless its broken. (+ keep players who have no mathmatical knowledge as far away from it as possible...)

[masterekat]

(+ keep players who have no mathmatical knowledge as far away from it as possible...)

>.>

.
.
.

[jarco]

One of mine lives in a town where coins are the basic currency.
It works great there. There is a good group of people managing the system and they train new people who wan't to get in that group for years on how to do it.

My objective in that system. Get so rich everyone works for me
I strive to become a Buisiness power without anyone noticing.

[Cogliostro]

Coins will be widely used as soon as staff are able to implement coin operated vending machines.

Then having and using coins becomes a distinct advantage: you can get something you want from the vending machine without waiting for anybody to wake up and trade with you.

Clothing crumbling away is a the worst thought-out idea in ages. Not only is clothing entirely decorative, with no game function, very difficult to make, but now it would also constantly need to be maintained (just like your pile of extra hammers, sickles and screwdrivers?). I forsee a simple player solution to this: ignoring clothing, just as they currently ignore 85% of extant costructable items & weapons.

That would be very sad.

[NostalgicMelody7]

I really like the idea of having a currency system, but there are so many things that go into it. For example, in the real world. I don't know exactly how the system is, but the value of currency is based off of a ton of things, like how much gold a place has, or how good the economy is. There are tons of problems with this, too. For example, who's to say that gold is the most valuable substance, and therefore shows your wealth? Sure, it's pretty, but imagine an island that's completely full of gold! Nobody would have need of it, and therefore it would be worth nothing. Maybe potatoes would be a sign of wealth or something, I don't know.

I think I'm going to research more about how governments establish the rate of their currency and stuff, and work from there. Wish me luck! *applies nerd glasses*

[Snickie]

For example, who's to say that gold is the most valuable substance, and therefore shows your wealth? Sure, it's pretty, but imagine an island that's completely full of gold! Nobody would have need of it, and therefore it would be worth nothing. Maybe potatoes would be a sign of wealth or something, I don't know.

We were learning about this in American History recently. I'm just going to try to sum it up a bit off the top of my head, so I apologize ahead of time if it seems to be jumping all over the place.

The discovery of silver in the mountains of the west made people want to switch our currency system to silver. I want to say it was in the late 1800s "The Gilded Age", there was a political party formed by a bunch of farmers, called the Populists' party, and one of their main goals as a party was to switch our currency base from gold to silver because of the silver availability. Sometime around then, Congress issued some Sherman act (there seem to be a lot of bills with the name Sherman in it, so the other stuff in the titles tend to confuse me lol) authorized the trade of gold for silver in the national treasury, but that was repealed in the early 1900s.

I think that our currency wasn't originally backed with anything, and then they started to back it with gold, but now it's backed by the general wealth of our economy, just as the Euro is and maybe even the British Pound. It's why inflation and deflation can happen so easily. Printing more money without the backing means that the value of the dollar goes down. Greenbacks only have value because we give them value; otherwise it's just a piece of cotton with the name of some major historical figure on it.

I personally think that, iRL, we should go back to a coin-based system. But that's just me, and Me does not feel like arguing politics.

On Cantr, I'll support a coin system when coins become easier to mint.



I'm going to requote this, just because it's not completely relevant to my earlier point.

For example, who's to say that gold is the most valuable substance, and therefore shows your wealth? Sure, it's pretty, but imagine an island that's completely full of gold! Nobody would have need of it, and therefore it would be worth nothing. Maybe potatoes would be a sign of wealth or something, I don't know.

Do you remember the California gold rush of 1848 and 1849? Well, I'm pretty sure that something like that would happen if we were to find an island that's full of gold. We'd all run over there, try our hardest to strike it rich but end up with not much more than maybe a few thousand dollars with while the bigger corporations with commercial equipment ends up raking it in. Then we'd take over the government, like we did to Hawaii when we discovered their sugar crops, and force the place to become a territory/protectorate/province, all while starting a political revolution towards socialism and communism because we're jealous that the big company with the commercial means to get the gold got all the gold and they should share it with the rest of us, and as long as we remain capitalist we're going to cry for it to be communist, until we become communist/socialist and realize it sucks because those of us who work do it at a loss which goes to the people who sit around and do nothing, and we'll have a Berlin wall situation, except (if it's American) it'll just be people picking up and deserting the island to come back to the capitalist mainland (unless we're unlucky enough that the American mainland is communist too, in which case we'll try to flee to some other capitalist country).

Or some variant of that.

[NostalgicMelody7]

@_@
Thank you for frying my brain LOL

But, yeah, I think I get what you're saying. Maybe. So... In your opinion, Snickie, what would be the best way to start a currency thinger on a new island? Or would it be easier to switch an established island? I don't know. I have the biggest migraine in the world at the moment.

[Snickie]

The only thing I can really think of at the moment is a "He who does not work will not eat" martial law scenario such as we had with John Smith in Jamestown in the early 1600's. But I'm not an economist, and I'm not sure how that would work in today's society (both iRL and Cantr).

My thoughts: if you do it on Cantr, start in one town with some people who agree with you and are capable of enforcing it effectively, and then slowly add more towns to your regimen, adding a mint in each town I suppose (or maybe keep the mints in the towns that have those resources naturally) and keeping track of your mints so your people know which currencies to accept or not accept (in case there are people who want you to use their coin instead of yours). And eventually it'll become commonplace, maybe. I don't really know. Like I said: not an economist. I just like history.

Maybe someone who was around when Klojt started using coins could come on and explain how they got that to work.