Less time to make coins.

[BZR]

I don't like this idea.

Don't forget that I could produce kilos of iron coins in a nieghbour city, than go with them to the city with that "banking system" exchange it for much more kilos of iron, then go back and again again again.

[formerly known as hf]

It wouldn't work like that, as each coin press has a unique number which coins are marked with.


Wilmer has made the point I always bang on about, and have been long before coins, - that the currency of Cantr is time.

As long as it is possible to, reasonably accurately, work out the value of a resource or item in terms of time taken, then coins will not appeal and will not be used.

Skills need to have even more of an effect on gathering rates, or gathering rates for the same resource need to vary between locations, or both.

Also, as Sociologist points out, currency required quite extensive civilization progress before it was widely accepted. We don't yet have the communication infrastructure, nor the volume and diversity of trade, in Cantr to support a currency.

[BZR]

Oh sorry, I haven't read carefuly.

x grams of lord whoever iron coins.... sounds better... but hard to implement I think

[Zanthos]

I personally think that the method of determining how many resources you want to gather should be changed to how long you want to work, and then skills will come into effect from there. They could function basically the same way, but it would be a shift from getting paid for a day's labor worth of coal to how many grams of coal you gathered in a day.

I may not be explaining this well and it probably sounds like i said the exact same thing, but it makes sense in my head... (which probably means that its a bad idea)

[Augery]

I personally think that the method of determining how many resources you want to gather should be changed to how long you want to work, and then skills will come into effect from there. They could function basically the same way, but it would be a shift from getting paid for a day's labor worth of coal to how many grams of coal you gathered in a day.

I like this.

[Talapus]

I personally think that the method of determining how many resources you want to gather should be changed to how long you want to work, and then skills will come into effect from there.

This actually has lots of problems. Either the outcome is determined by the person who starts the project, or the person who ends it. Either way, you would want to rest and recover your itredness right before you finish the project, so as to get maximum results. If it is the person who starts the project, you only need the expert to start a bunch of projects, and have non experts working on them. If it is who finishes the project, you can have the non experts get the project near complete, and then have the expert finish off the last hour or two to maximumize returns. There is no easy way around this besides what we already have. Besides, all this would really give us is that we wouldn't have to waste an hour finishing up that small project that is at 99.9%.

[wichita]

I like that idea of project function as well, but I think it would disrupt the game too much for relatively little payoff. I would have much rather seen skills affect the average yield, rather than the gathering rate, but c'est la vie what we have works too.


Alright. Back to coins.

[Mykey]

I apologise that, I can help nothing. But it is assured, that you will find the correct decision.

[Zanthos]

Well let me rephrase what I was trying to say:

People could invest how many hours they want to work on a project, and their payout would be a varriation based on their skill. What would be different from now is that resources would be produced every time the hour changes, so instead of having a person getting 200 mushrooms after 8 hours, they would get 25 mushrooms every hour. On top of this, tiredness and skill could affect the quantity of resources gathered, instead of how long it takes to gather them.

This might also help in sicutations where one gets screwed when harvesting like 10kg of wood only to get hit with the -20% (not that its ever been that bad for me)

But as for coins, why are clothes weightless when coins arent?

[Mykey]

I can look for the reference to a site on which there is a lot of information on this question.

[The Sociologist]

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.

This is where the wheels tend to fall off the whole project. Coins today are mere tokens, but coins historically were simply a way of certifying a given quantity of precious metal. That way you didn't need to lug a little sack of gold dust and a pair of scales to market every day. What if the wind was blowing? And that's all coins were understood to be at first. So when governments sometimes tried to mess around with alloys, thereby "debasing" their own coinage, the result often was an early version of "inflation."

Now in Cantr, the level of social trust is way way too low to permit the modern idea to take hold...assuming characters are acting rationally. Of course any given player may decide to let one of his or her charries accept token coinage for roleplay purposes, but then the charrie would not really be acting as a rational economic agent.

Another strange thing is that part of the definition (in economics) of the need for coinage includes "convenience" and "divisibility", whereas coins in Cantr are less convenient and less divisible than simply trading "x grams of y". In fact, coins are a pain!

These are some ways to help get coinage accepted in Cantr:

1. Make manufacturing costs minimal in relation to precious metal content. It would also be necessary to handle and exchange coins in large stacks, as close as possible to the convenience of trading "x grams of y".

2. Make resources degrade slowly over time, but the metals used for coins much less so, and coins would not degrade at all. That's important!

3. Perhaps make thievery possible of resources held by characters, though not items. In other words a thief might make off with some x percent of a random resource you are carrying. But coins, being in your money belt, would be safe.

4. Mykey did have a point, though most of you weren't paying enough attention. If coins have no weight (because they are stored in your money belt and not carried on your back, let's say ), then that would enormously boost their "convenience" factor.

5. There could be many other suggestions in the list, but these two things are essential for now: (a) the value of a coin must essentially be its metal content; (b) the convenience factor of coins must outweigh the convenience of barter (and this could include security issues).

[in vitro...]

coins should weight 1/10 of the metal's weight.

[Nakranoth]

I have Iron, I press it into coins, and thus it weighs less... I fail to follow the logic here.
However, by minting coins, a government could readily use them as a standard in relation to the current concept of days labor, ie, 100 g of their coinage is worth a days labor within that city.
On the other hand, if they were brought out of that city, unless the merchents there accept the city's currency at the same value, would be worth only the materials in it. In this instance, the convienance is that it's significantly lighter to carry 100 grams of coin than it is to carry a days worth of just about anything.
The value would thus be set by the merchents, but be based on the city's amount minted and backing of the coins. In other words, as long as the city acts as though the coin is worth what they say it is, and pay people accordingly, then a merchant in the city could use the coins as a sort of means of giving their goods to the section of the city that needs what he has then bring the coins to whoever has what he needs.
This of course assumes specialized labor, a prerequisite to currency in real life.

[Zanthos]

by the same logic:

I have tortoise shell, I have bones, I make them into a helmit and it suddenly weighs nothing?

Cantr isn't 100% realistic, we should do like what was done with clothing and not make them a burden to have.