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DF Suggestions / Re: Making coins useful in trade
« on: November 30, 2012, 05:21:45 pm »Coins seem to me less like they are important for your Fortress tradings and more that it is something you need to support an economy within your fortress.Coins are small, durable, and function quite well as a measure of value, making them useful in both intra- and intersettlement trading.
Which it isn't useful right now because there is no fortress economy and even if there was your Dwarves do not desire it.
I'd think after a period of time Dwarves would start to get mad that they arn't getting paid real money.
Agreed with the rest, though.
All of those apply to DF coins, at least in 1.0.Consider the time period of DF. The value of currency in medieval / renaissance times wasn't directly regulated by central banks, coins had innate value because they were made out of valuable materials (unlike the scraps of paper or bits of information nowadays).Coins are just slugs of metal, with no more value than the material they're crafted from; they're not actually useful for anything. They should barter for less than goods, as if you were trading scrap copper (or whatever metal) that has to be melted down, purified and worked before you can do anything good with it.By that logic, anything without a good, practical use is also worthless except for scrap.
Coins are far from useless, though. They have lots of advantages over other means of storing value. Coins don't rot, die or break, for example. Their value is comparatively stable, they are easy to store, easy to swap against more practical goods; and maybe most important: you can compare the values of other goods using coins.
That was maybe the main confusion in this thread: in DF, everything has a universal, unchanging value, which makes trading easier, but defeats the main point of a currency. Once we have some supply and demand, coins will have to be used for trading, and the trader profits won't be as apparent.
Also, if you flip a coin, you get a random outcome
Quote
Indeed.The Spanish dollar is a nice historical example. It was accepted in basically all of Europe and the colonies because Spain had lots of economical power and their coins were of high-quality silver.QuoteCurrency allows you to easily transfer and redeem debts in a non-specific way, but only if everyone involved recognizes the value and nature of the debt, and the trading tokens.I think that "within your own civ" was implied. If not...well, many non-American nations accept the American dollar; perhaps human or elven nations would accept coins from a powerful dwarven nation, or at least one they regularly trade with. Currency from their own nation would be preferred, of course, but dwarven coins would be worth more than mere "slugs of metal."
I'm thinking coins should barter for significantly less than their value (because they have no inherent use) under normal circumstances, but within your own civilization (assuming a working economy), and with allied civilizations that maintain trade agreements with yours, they should barter at a higher value because of their attractive fungibility. Merchants would take their profit cut either way.
The caravan arc should give some nice options. It would be fun to establish your currency in the trading nations and then just screw with everyone's economy.
I think the central debate has become whether or not coins should be used as a currency, and if so, how.1. Civs would exchange money based on what they felt the others' currency was worth.
My original post assumed it should.
The way different Civs deal with coinage is a separate issue. How will money exchanging work? How will trade routes between different Civs work if they don't take each others money? Valid questions all, and I have opinions on them, but my original post was a suggestion to solve the problem "How do we make coins a currency while crossbow bolts are not?"
And about filing coins, I think you would just not transact the amount of coins agreed upon. If a trader files off 1% of each coin then gives you 100 coins, your coin stack would still say its 100 coins until restacked (see Bloat251 on the Dev plan) where it would reveal that you only got 99 coins. Fractional coins could be determined randomly or rounded.
2. Same way most trade works now in DF--barter.
3. I dunno, what is it about putting 100 coins in a pile that makes it obvious that 1% is missing from each? I'd rather have finding out require actually trying, and yet possible on stacks as small as 1.
convert those people.