I suppose gold coins have been a form of currency the world over for thousands of years... I guess all that really remains is to find the name for their currency...


How about D'niro?... Agebucks?... GuilDollars?... no?

ah well, guess this is something that will have to be left to RAWA to spoon-feed us at some point.

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D'ni M'ni

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Tweek wrote:

D'ni M'ni

So does that make counterfits F'ni M'ni?

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"When you are courting a beautiful woman an hour seems like a second. When you are sitting on a hot cinder a second seems like an hour. That is relativity" -Albert Einstein

greendragoon wrote:

Considering that the Kadish Vault was filled with gold coins, one could speculate that a gold coin served as the unit for their currency.

Considering the stringent standards around age writing I don't think a ton of Ages were available. So owning an age was the equivalent to being a mine or plantation owner. I've always pictured D'ni's economy being something like that of England around the medieval ages where you had wealthy landowners, or Age owners in this case, and then the lower class who would work it for them. Of course having the guilds in there throws an interesting twist on it.

Just because Kadish's vault was full of gold coins doesn't mean their monetary system revolved around them. Gold coins are certainly valuable in today's market, and even more so if you have a vault full of them. But that doesn't mean our country's currency is gold.

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Calam wrote:

Just because Kadish's vault was full of gold coins doesn't mean their monetary system revolved around them. Gold coins are certainly valuable in today's market, and even more so if you have a vault full of them. But that doesn't mean our country's currency is gold.

But gold is not likely to be very valuable in a society where any half-decent Writer could Write himself all the gold he'd ever need. Your earlier points are valid, but they aren't enough to keep gold valuable. Gold is very easy to obtain and use, and it isn't especially valuable as a raw material for anything. Gold is valuable in our society solely because of its scarcity. Contrast to, say, diamonds, which are relatively plentiful but made valuable because of a monopoly on diamond cutting.

I'd say it's very likely that gold-coloured coins (which may or may not have been made of gold) were used as currency in D'ni. There's no other explanation for why Kadish would have so many, even if you assume gold was valuable for entirely hand-wavy reasons.

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Bogardan Mage wrote:

I'd say it's very likely that gold-coloured coins (which may or may not have been made of gold) were used as currency in D'ni. There's no other explanation for why Kadish would have so many, even if you assume gold was valuable for entirely hand-wavy reasons.

You've made a good point that the "gold-coloured coins" may not have actually been made of gold. Perhaps they were chocolate coins covered in gold foil, in which case, there's no great mystery as to why they were valued and horded.

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I think the manpower idea was the best so far. If I could write any raw material, the craftsmanship of an object would factor much higher into the worth equation. An ornate, 100 man hour vase would be much more valuable than 100 gold coins in that situation. Though they may have used the gold, which had been properly minted and certified, as a money substitute, much like paper money today. Paper money is worth nothing in and of itself, it simply represents labor time and raw materials, and can be traded.

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Precisely.

It may be gold, it may not be. It probably is, in my opinion-- but that's irrelevant. The point is that whatever he put in his Vault is what he felt was valuable, and if those "gold" coins were in his vault, then the conclusion is that they were/are valuable.

Also keep in mind that there were a great deal of rules and regulations regarding Writing Ages, and I'm sure there were even more in situations where an Age is Written just to harvest a resource (like wood or precious metals). If you want to create an Age where whatever you're harvesting is unique and valuable (like the spores in Teledahn), then whatever you Write into the Age to harvest needs to be unique and hard to acquire. This means that, for whatever reasons, the precious metals in Kadish's vault are valuable because of their rarity, their difficulty to acquire, or both.

Which then leads us to believe there would have been some barrier to Writers just Writing Ages of solid gold, seeing as this would collapse the value of gold. There had to be rules of some kind, or the value of any one object would fluctuate wildly.

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Calam wrote:

Precisely.

It may be gold, it may not be. It probably is, in my opinion-- but that's irrelevant. The point is that whatever he put in his Vault is what he felt was valuable, and if those "gold" coins were in his vault, then the conclusion is that they were/are valuable.

Also keep in mind that there were a great deal of rules and regulations regarding Writing Ages, and I'm sure there were even more in situations where an Age is Written just to harvest a resource (like wood or precious metals). If you want to create an Age where whatever you're harvesting is unique and valuable (like the spores in Teledahn), then whatever you Write into the Age to harvest needs to be unique and hard to acquire. This means that, for whatever reasons, the precious metals in Kadish's vault are valuable because of their rarity, their difficulty to acquire, or both.

Which then leads us to believe there would have been some barrier to Writers just Writing Ages of solid gold, seeing as this would collapse the value of gold. There had to be rules of some kind, or the value of any one object would fluctuate wildly.

Or they might have been valuable because they were arbitrarily designated as being valuable (i.e. currency). Our society has moved beyond a purely resource based economy, and I don't see why the D'ni couldn't have either. There's no reason to believe that gold was valuable in D'ni society. The coins are obviously coins, offering an alternate explanation for their value. They may or may not be real gold (or for that matter metal, they could be made of anything). I don't see why you are so insistent to make up these convoluted explanations for how gold is somehow difficult to Write when there's a much simpler explanation!

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Um...he didn't say that gold was difficult to Write. What he said was that if gold was the currency used by D'ni, it would have been strictly controlled so that you couldn't just Write an Age full of gold. I'm sure that would have been true regardless of what the designated currency was made of. Every Age was inspected and approved, you don't think it's possible they would make sure their money didn't become devalued by a greedy Writer?

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Bogardan Mage wrote:

Calam wrote:

Precisely.

It may be gold, it may not be. It probably is, in my opinion-- but that's irrelevant. The point is that whatever he put in his Vault is what he felt was valuable, and if those "gold" coins were in his vault, then the conclusion is that they were/are valuable.

Also keep in mind that there were a great deal of rules and regulations regarding Writing Ages, and I'm sure there were even more in situations where an Age is Written just to harvest a resource (like wood or precious metals). If you want to create an Age where whatever you're harvesting is unique and valuable (like the spores in Teledahn), then whatever you Write into the Age to harvest needs to be unique and hard to acquire. This means that, for whatever reasons, the precious metals in Kadish's vault are valuable because of their rarity, their difficulty to acquire, or both.

Which then leads us to believe there would have been some barrier to Writers just Writing Ages of solid gold, seeing as this would collapse the value of gold. There had to be rules of some kind, or the value of any one object would fluctuate wildly.

Or they might have been valuable because they were arbitrarily designated as being valuable (i.e. currency). Our society has moved beyond a purely resource based economy, and I don't see why the D'ni couldn't have either. There's no reason to believe that gold was valuable in D'ni society. The coins are obviously coins, offering an alternate explanation for their value. They may or may not be real gold (or for that matter metal, they could be made of anything). I don't see why you are so insistent to make up these convoluted explanations for how gold is somehow difficult to Write when there's a much simpler explanation!

My explanations were not convoluted, and I never said gold was "difficult" to Write. We've established that the gold, or whatever it is, is valuable for one reason or another, be it the fact that it's gold or the fact that it's currency-- probably both. I suspect they are currency because they are gold. But, as I already said, it still doesn't resolve what their economy's form of currency was. Just because we found gold coins in Kadish's vault doesn't mean that was their currency.

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Calam wrote:

My explanations were not convoluted,

Yes, you're right. I don't know, "needlessly complicated"? The point is, you're trying to come up with good reasons why gold would be inherently valuable to the D'ni and there aren't any! Why not just take the simplest solution?

Calam wrote:

and I never said gold was "difficult" to Write. We've established that the gold, or whatever it is, is valuable for one reason or another, be it the fact that it's gold or the fact that it's currency-- probably both.

Why probably both? What are you basing that on? Just because gold is valuable to us doesn't mean it was valuable to them!

Calam wrote:

I suspect they are currency because they are gold.

There is no reason to suspect this and plenty of reasons to suspect the opposite.

Calam wrote:

But, as I already said, it still doesn't resolve what their economy's form of currency was. Just because we found gold coins in Kadish's vault doesn't mean that was their currency.

It does if you don't assume they were all avid followers of Ayn Rand and Ludwig von Mises!

If the D'ni economy was ever based on gold it wouldn't have stayed that way very long. All it would take is one rogue Writer and the entire market collapses faster than you can say "Perhaps the ending has not yet been written". The whole point of a gold standard is to prevent that kind of thing! In a society where it was relatively easy (whether it was also illegal or not) to acquire gold it doesn't make sense to use it to base an economy!

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Bogardan Mage wrote:

Calam wrote:

My explanations were not convoluted,

Yes, you're right. I don't know, "needlessly complicated"? The point is, you're trying to come up with good reasons why gold would be inherently valuable to the D'ni and there aren't any! Why not just take the simplest solution?

Calam wrote:

and I never said gold was "difficult" to Write. We've established that the gold, or whatever it is, is valuable for one reason or another, be it the fact that it's gold or the fact that it's currency-- probably both.

Why probably both? What are you basing that on? Just because gold is valuable to us doesn't mean it was valuable to them!

Calam wrote:

I suspect they are currency because they are gold.

There is no reason to suspect this and plenty of reasons to suspect the opposite.

Calam wrote:

But, as I already said, it still doesn't resolve what their economy's form of currency was. Just because we found gold coins in Kadish's vault doesn't mean that was their currency.

It does if you don't assume they were all avid followers of Ayn Rand and Ludwig von Mises!

If the D'ni economy was ever based on gold it wouldn't have stayed that way very long. All it would take is one rogue Writer and the entire market collapses faster than you can say "Perhaps the ending has not yet been written". The whole point of a gold standard is to prevent that kind of thing! In a society where it was relatively easy (whether it was also illegal or not) to acquire gold it doesn't make sense to use it to base an economy!

Whoa, chill out. You don't need to make this into an argument.

1. I'm forming my opinions based on the information presented to me.

2. I'm basing their value on gold on the fact that there are millions of gold coins in Kadish's vault. How was I not clear before?

3. The presence of gold coins in a vault is no basis to assume that gold coins were their currency. There are shields and rugs in his vault, too. Should we assume they used those as currency as well?

And as Ian Atrus said, and as I already said, virtually ANY resource being harvested in an Age that was vital to the D'ni economy probably would have been heavily regulated, regardless of what it was. Keep in mind that 'value' is a subjective term.

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Ian Atrus wrote:

Precisely because of Writing, coinage made of one single material would be particularly easy to fake or inflate - however, since there weren't that many private Ages to start with, and all but the rogue ones were periodically checked by Maintainers, the ruling bodies would not have allowed something that could intentionally destabilize the economy on a grand level. The occasional fake coin could slip through, but someone getting filthy rich overnight would have raised a few eyebrows in a relatively small community like D'ni.
A cheap way around that would be to make the coins something that cannot be replicated without some big and hard to find machinery: make them reconstructed atoms like Nara and Deretheni and you're set; you can also make them shining like gold, if you want.

Kinda like the Orichalchum beads in the old Lucasarts game "Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis". Those were made by reconstructing the atoms from a river of magma... could be that the coins themselves are valuable to the D'ni for another reason...

I always thought our concept of paper money was really silly...

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