Less time to make coins.

[Mykey]

In it something is. Earlier I thought differently, thanks for an explanation.

[wietse]

You have to have somebody that can back up the coin with real value in goods. Otherwise it is worthless. But that is exactly what happens in real life. You have to have trust before they can work.

And if a company/person can back it up, then more people are willing to accept the coin as payment and use it themselves, because they now they can always hand it in for goods.

[Talapus]

This is true, so long as the value is agreed on, and the person taking the coins has something you want. Other than that, they have very real practical value, equivlent to the resources used to make them.

But if the coin is only ever valued at the materials it is made from, there is no reason to ever have made the coin in the first place. Coins only ever become worthwhile if the are worth more then the base metal (although as you have mentioned, they do have intrensic worth if push comes to shove).

[wietse]

And i feel i can tell from experience, the coin system can work.
It just needs a lot of patience and trust in a stable bank/backup company, which is hard if everyone dies around you.

We have currently coins worth a couple of hundred days work in roulation (dont know if that's a correct english word).
And the coins are accepted by at least one person each in 3-4 villages.

[Mykey]

It agree, it is a remarkable piece

[Wilmer Bordonado]

Returning to the matter of this post, the acceleration of the project of making coins...

Coins are not valuable because of the work used to make them, but because of the things you can get with them. It's a trading object, a sign without any value in itself, just the cost of the metal used to make it.

Why add a capital gain to an object it has no value in itself?

Time is the most valuable factor in Cantr. In many sites, the prices are considered because of the "days of work", or what's the same, the amount of time you used to make something. Trading raw materials is a primitive way of trading objects ("I give you 1400g of spinach for a bone club") So we know that two days of labour gives us the possibility of buying a bone club.

Coins are different. There's a government which has power, and decide to create an icon -the coins- to fix the prices, according its needs of resources. Then a currency system would give them the possibility of getting more than spinach for a bone club. Offer and demand would establish the prices of objects, and surely spinach wouldn't have the value of being trade for a bone club, if too much of spinach is there in the site.

Coins are just a sign, a meaning... nothing else. The one who makes them has to be sure of not abusing of the coin press. Too many coins in circulation would make them capable of buying anything, including the coin press.

It's time for Economies to appear in Cantr World. But... Why something would spend time on building something it has no value in itself? That must me changed!!

Wilmer B.

ps. Real Life Context: http://www.treasury.gov/education/faq/coins/production.shtml The US government makes 28 billions of coins a year. 76 millions of them per day.
I know it's useless to compare... but... 20 coins a day?????

[wichita]

Hmm. I am not sure which way to decide here....lots of long winded arguments about something I don't think makes much difference.


I personally find 20 coins per day an adequate rate. I am usually wrong about the assessment of my characters' well being, though. Thankfully, I have several people on the forums willing to point out my misjudgements to me.

I am thinking about it. Right now I am leaning towards I don't care. If Chris feels like upping the rate for us even more, so we can spend an hour rather than a day cluttering our inventories with coins that don't stack, I might say alright.

[Nosajimiki]

The US government makes 28 billions of coins a year. 76 millions of them per day. I know it's useless to compare... but... 20 coins a day?????

I think the big problem is you are used to living in an economy where a single coin is virtually worthless, yeah we have coins IRL to anotate down to litterally a few seconds of labour at minimum wage, but Cantr doesn't have a such a thing as a second of labour, the smallest unit of labour is is the hour = 1/8th day. Even considering that we don't work day-round here, that's worth about 5-6 American dollars minimum wage 9-15 for a more average income. that's a lot more than a RL pennie or even quarter. Since they don't stack, not very many people want anything less than a 1 day labour coin anyway (maybe coin presses need press-plates that can be used to copy coins in such a way that it can make identical stackable items) regardless 1-day labour: that's atleast 44 american dollars. The more popular 5 and 10 DL coins you are looking at coins that equate to several hundread dollars a piece so what's so bad about only being able to press $5,000-10,000 of coinage a day? Not too bad for a single manual press if you ask me. Besides, more than that and it wont make much difference anyway, even cheap coinage matterials like copper can't be easilly gathered at a rate to make more than 20 coins per day anyway. Ussal value for Iron?(40-60g/day) Steel?(20-40) Gold? (10-20) A faster press won't help you make most coins much faster anyway, unless coins were also made lighter, inwhich case the "real" value of coins would decrease and you'd just need to press that many more of the things.

[Mykey]

It is reserve

[Wilmer Bordonado]

A faster press won't help you make most coins much faster anyway, unless coins were also made lighter, inwhich case the "real" value of coins would decrease and you'd just need to press that many more of the things.

Oh, you're missing the point. I'll try to show you why.

Let's suppose 1 copper coin represents 100g of wood, for instance.
Let's say there's a jeep in sale in a city very far away from where you are, and its price it's 50k of wood, thinking it in a primitive way of trading.
And you do want to buy that jeep, so...

... You have to gather 50k of wood, not all together, but in five times of 10k each, to put it in your inventory, and then travel to that far away city, talk to the owner of the jeep, promise him/her you'll bring 40k of wood, travel again back, gather 10k of wood, hit the road again hoping the jeep hasn't been sold yet... and so...

... You travel to that city so far away. You find they have a currency system. The jeep you like cost 5,000 "far away city" copper coins. (or even better, 500 gold coins, or 50,000 cobalt coins) You don't have any "far away city" coins into your inventory. So you think it's better to find a job. Yes, that man over there offer you 70 copper coins to repair an old scimitar. So you take the job and start to save the coins for the jeep.

... Oh, but you're a bandit, yes... Why working so hard on those repairings? You have all the items to make your own coin press. You have copper, too. So... Well... You need a building, but let's split this detail. You make your own coin press, which will make "my own" coins. You have 5k of copper in your inventory... Oh yes, that jeep will be yours! Then you make 5,000 "my own" coins, and you go to the owner of the jeep just to buy it. He say: Oh boy, I don't want those "my own" coins, I only accept the "far away city" coins.

Money are just a representation of what your charrie has done. Have you worked? So there's your coins. Have you followed city's rules? There's your coins. Have you steled them? There's your coins, too!
Why giving a value -more than the one them have on the material used- to coins, consisting on work and time?
Coins might be done immediately, with no waste of time. Press proccess: put the metal, push the press, open the press... Oh, COINS!

Wilmer B.

[Talapus]

I find it hard to follow of of what you just said. Were you suggesting that the specific names of coins were removed (so all copper coins would appear alike)? If that is the case, why wouldn't you just trade the raw material? As I mentioned before, coins cannot have an equal or lesser value then the material they are made out of, or else it would make more sense just to trade the raw metal. Therefore, coins to be successful must be worth more then their base metal, which can only happen with trust, which requires the specific names on coins.

[Crosshair]

I think It'd help us work out the entire coinage issue if we decided on creating a hypothetical town which just started out on a Coinage issue, and work out what they'd need, what their resources were etc... If we worked it out hypothetically, it'd be much easier to see the flaws in the plan, because in Cantr, no one has really made a large scale currency.

[Chris Johnson]

ps. Real Life Context: http://www.treasury.gov/education/faq/coins/production.shtml The US government makes 28 billions of coins a year. 76 millions of them per day.
I know it's useless to compare... but... 20 coins a day?????

Yep sounds like our rates are too high - 76 million coins per day with a total population of 295 million - so thats a production rate of about 1 coin for every 4 people per day - A Character using a Cantr coin press can produce 20 coins a day (40 if two people work on it) - but only 2 towns have populations of 70 or more in Cantr (according to last census figures) so coin production rates in Cantr are potentially much more than in the USA .. but as you say ...it's useless to compare

[Crosshair]

why not try to compare... luxembourg before the Euro?

[Kanon]

The problem with the coins is not the time you spend in making them, but the cost. The resources needed to make coins already set a minimal price for them, even for the coins made from the "cheaper" metals. If making coins were really cheap, It wouldn't really matter the time, because you could release a small amount of coins, representing a high amount of resources, and when the value of the resources backing up the coins go higher, you could choose either to release more coins, or assign a higher exchange rate (as in revaluation of coinage), and if the value of the resources go down, you could devaluate. The person releasing the coins should be able to put the value, no matter the price of making the coins for any monetary system to work.
And I know it sound unrealistic, because even making coins of stone (as the Flintstones ) would set a minimum value for them. That's why the coins are not the key to a monetary system in Cantr, but a new, needed machine/object: Paper Money