Cash in Traveller
- Thread starter GKar
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There is a reason the 'gold standard' died out in modern economics - there is not enough gold to support the amount of currency in circulation... (Although the British pound notes still carry – "I Promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of XX pounds"). Transferring large amounts of metal in currency is also kind of hard on the merchants – so much cargo space goes for transporting the profits.
As for the problems with e-money – what we see today is not real, tamperproof electronic cash. Most banks just send numbers around under some week encryption and hope for the best. 'Real' e-cash ™ is encrypted and signed tokens with public/private key encryption mechanisms in dedicated chips. They talk to each other to verify signatures, tamper attempts and leave audit trails. These tokens work today in closed communities – with large enough keys to give the NSA a headache – so the future is quite bright…
Avi
As for the problems with e-money – what we see today is not real, tamperproof electronic cash. Most banks just send numbers around under some week encryption and hope for the best. 'Real' e-cash ™ is encrypted and signed tokens with public/private key encryption mechanisms in dedicated chips. They talk to each other to verify signatures, tamper attempts and leave audit trails. These tokens work today in closed communities – with large enough keys to give the NSA a headache – so the future is quite bright…
Avi
^True, but nothing sparks the imagination of players as the promise of payment in untraceable gold bars.
To keep my local currencies interesting to the players I make many of them “based” on something. Realism sometimes takes aback seat to the story. Gold is very shiny and Arghhhhhh… pirate style.
To keep my local currencies interesting to the players I make many of them “based” on something. Realism sometimes takes aback seat to the story. Gold is very shiny and Arghhhhhh… pirate style.
Icosahedron
SOC-14 1K
IMTU I have a variety of interlinked methods of transferring wealth.
1. A system of Advance Transfer, using Jump-6 X-boats to transfer data electronically between banks in different systems. Not many adventurers can outrun a J6 credit rating for long.
2. A system of electronic transfer that uses a ship's computer like an ATM, if you're going way off the X-boat route.
3. A smart card that works something like today's travellers cheque cards.
4. Preloaded cash cards similar to today's phone cards (useful for vending machines, etc)
5. Cr coins, (cash) similar to casino chips, with a built in anti-tamper silicon chip.
6. Commodities. Bullion, drugs, whatever.
I employ the friend of a freind idea, and RoS's aggressor group idea to reduce fraud. Credit chips and smart cards are generally not worth forging, and to forge anything reliably against Imperial security would take the long-term concerted effort of major organised crime cartels.
A couple of PCs want to fiddle with finance? Go see the big boys. Just remember, even if you manage to ask just the right questions to keep your kneecaps, Mr Big may want a favour or two in return...
1. A system of Advance Transfer, using Jump-6 X-boats to transfer data electronically between banks in different systems. Not many adventurers can outrun a J6 credit rating for long.
2. A system of electronic transfer that uses a ship's computer like an ATM, if you're going way off the X-boat route.
3. A smart card that works something like today's travellers cheque cards.
4. Preloaded cash cards similar to today's phone cards (useful for vending machines, etc)
5. Cr coins, (cash) similar to casino chips, with a built in anti-tamper silicon chip.
6. Commodities. Bullion, drugs, whatever.
I employ the friend of a freind idea, and RoS's aggressor group idea to reduce fraud. Credit chips and smart cards are generally not worth forging, and to forge anything reliably against Imperial security would take the long-term concerted effort of major organised crime cartels.
A couple of PCs want to fiddle with finance? Go see the big boys. Just remember, even if you manage to ask just the right questions to keep your kneecaps, Mr Big may want a favour or two in return...
But in space, there is alot more gold! Most of the Gold Earth sunk to the Earth's core when it was still molten. The cores of asteroids are alot closer than the core of the Earth. My Federation silver credits are quite large, about one thirtieth of a kilogram, slightly larger and heavier than the first edition AD&D coins which were one tenth of a pound. Cr30 weight 1kg
Cr300 in gold weighs 1kg, Cr3,000 in platinum weighs 1 kg, Cr30,000 in iridium weighs 1kg. Since this stuff is mostly mined in space, their scarcity on Earth today have little relevance to their values in Traveller.
B
Black Globe Generator
Guest
Originally posted by Laryssa:
That sounds like fun to lug around!
I have a few scattered low-tech worlds that use specie, but only as local currency. Most coins made of precious metals are curiosities of value to collectors, not a common means of exchange.
RainOfSteel
SOC-14 1K
That's one possibility.
But it would still be only a microscopic fraction of the Earth's core as a whole.
In what way?
Not geographically, the asteriods are a long way off.
Not in composition, either (unless I totally misread the news stories about the recent asteroid probes, or more news came out I haven't seen).
Gold is worth exactly 10 times what silver is worth? There is no historical basis for making gold so inexpensive. What is YTU's specific explanation for gold's value dropping so much when silver's value also did not experience a consequent drop in value?
Platinum is worth 10 times what gold is? How did platinum soar so when gold dropped in value? There have been times where gold has sold for more on the open market per ounce than platinum (and platinum has sold for more at times, as well).
Iridium is worth 10 times what platinum is? What? Platinum (1209) may be almost twice what gold (614.75) is today, but iridium (360) is only a little more than half what gold is.
If you want an expensive commodity metal, try rhodium, 4540/ounce today.
(The above prices were pulled from www.thebulliondesk.com/. If you enter "gold platinum iridium rhodium ask bid", this is the website that is at the top of Google's search list.)
The problems with Gold, Silver, and Platinum, or Rhodium as currency put them on the positive side of the ledger from the GMs point of view.Originally posted by Black Globe Generator:
</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by Laryssa:
That sounds like fun to lug around!
I have a few scattered low-tech worlds that use specie, but only as local currency. Most coins made of precious metals are curiosities of value to collectors, not a common means of exchange. </font>
An economy with a commodity based monetary system cannot do monetary policy, and scarcity of the metal may cause recessions from time to time. On the flip side, as a GM you want recessions, depressions and all kinds of turmoil in your campaign world as those things provide seeds for adventures. People who can't finc jobs often resort to deparate measures to survive.
If you have the Imperial Reserve printing notes with embedded circuits to foil counterfeiters. What if a pirate steals that currency and finds that the currency says, "This credit does not belong to you! You are not the legitimate owner of me as I was not aquired in a legitimate transaction, I belong to so-in-so instead. Blah Blah Blah" Gold coins make attractive treasure piles, piles of paper currency made fool proof with electronic measures can also be made unstealable as they will refer to credit cards in bank accounts etc.
It is alot easier to go to an asteroid and dig to its center from Earth than it is to start from Earth's surface and dig or drill all the way to Earth's core. We have sent probes to the asteroids after all, but not a one has ever been sent to the Earth's core. While the physical distance to Earth's core is less, it is alot easier to get to the center of an asteroid even today, not that it is easy or cheap. The main obstacles to digging to Earth's core are pressure and heat, getting any sort of technology to function under those conditions is practically impossible. Most asteroids are solid rock all the way through, they do not have significant gravity, so the rock weighs nearly nothing and so the pressure and heat does not build up that much. One can dig a tunnel straight through and out the other side in most cases and obtain what ever gold and silver that may be there. Earth has differentiated due to its gravity, most of the heavy stuff has sunk to its core when the Earth was molten.
D&D seems to have no problem setting up such easy to remember ratios as that. Rhodium maybe worth a look, just so long as its not toxic or radioactive.
Lets see, the density of Gold is 19.32 g/cm^3,
the density of silver is 10.50 g/cm^3.
Now seems to me that gold weighs almost twice as much as silver. Seems to me that more gold would sink to Earth center than silver would when Earth was molten, therefore the relative abundance of silver to gold, would be greater to a society without access to space asteroid mining that it would where the asteroids were accessible for mining.
I think Silver is something like $10 an ounce and Gold is about $500, with a ratio of 50:1 or 40:1 in the amount of silver equal to a given gold piece. I think its not out of the realm of possibility that the relative abundance of gold to silver could increase with asteroid mining in undifferentiated zero-g asteroids. Platinum doesn't cost ten times as much as gold and with a density of 21.45 g/cm^3, mining asteroids will likely increase its abundance in relative proportion to Gold. Maybe we'll skip platinum and go straight to Iridium coins being worth ten times as much as gold, and we'll use your rhodium as ten times the value of iridium, how does that sound?
Looking in the speculative trading table albeit the t20 lists, silver has a list value of 70k per ton vs 1000k for radioactives and 8000k for gold. This is more a 100:1 differential from silver to gold and still more than 10:1 differential from silver.
This is probably not due to either the scarcity or abundance of a metal but more to do with it's uses in a technological society.
Gold if it was available enough could easily replace most of the lesser metals used in electronics today, never oxidising or sublimating out. Does anybody remember Curtes Mathes tvs which used gold for their circuit boards and were basically invulnerable to the elements because of that. I still have one almost 25 years old that beats the heck out of the sets made in the last few years. My fear is that my local repairman might one day run out of CRT to replace the old ones, he hasn't had to do diddly with the actual electronics. Heck even computers use gold and platinum in their manufacture, one reason that they are considered toxic waste in many places and are recycled to reclaim these metals.
In the same way, paper money is a major improvement on the old bullion days. With only a few notes, you can buy a house, while it might take a couple of wagons to carry the actual gold you might use, one reason that gold coins lost their cachet so quickly. Most gold coins today are used as either bullion, collections and in the Muslim world, dowries.
This is probably not due to either the scarcity or abundance of a metal but more to do with it's uses in a technological society.
Gold if it was available enough could easily replace most of the lesser metals used in electronics today, never oxidising or sublimating out. Does anybody remember Curtes Mathes tvs which used gold for their circuit boards and were basically invulnerable to the elements because of that. I still have one almost 25 years old that beats the heck out of the sets made in the last few years. My fear is that my local repairman might one day run out of CRT to replace the old ones, he hasn't had to do diddly with the actual electronics. Heck even computers use gold and platinum in their manufacture, one reason that they are considered toxic waste in many places and are recycled to reclaim these metals.
In the same way, paper money is a major improvement on the old bullion days. With only a few notes, you can buy a house, while it might take a couple of wagons to carry the actual gold you might use, one reason that gold coins lost their cachet so quickly. Most gold coins today are used as either bullion, collections and in the Muslim world, dowries.
Peter Newman
SOC-12
'Salvage on Sharmun' in JTAS #4 features a Red Zoned planet with a crashed Scout Ship carrying CR 5,000,00 in cash (3 months cash pay for every naval personnel in the sector). The adventure notes that "the money in the crate was newly printed, with consecutive serial numbers within denominations. If any of the money returns to circulation, a massive Imperial investigation will be started"
Therefore we know that in the canonical Imperium the government is already tracking the serial numbers of the bills - but whether that's all the bills or just the ones that they were going to pay the navy with that go missing - is not spelled out.
Another consideration about money is that currency problems caused the fall of the Rule of Man, the Imperium is not going to keet this happen twice. Therefore they will be keeping some sort of controls on the monetary supply.
Therefore we know that in the canonical Imperium the government is already tracking the serial numbers of the bills - but whether that's all the bills or just the ones that they were going to pay the navy with that go missing - is not spelled out.
Another consideration about money is that currency problems caused the fall of the Rule of Man, the Imperium is not going to keet this happen twice. Therefore they will be keeping some sort of controls on the monetary supply.
RainOfSteel
SOC-14 1K
D&D seems to have no problem setting up such easy to remember ratios as that.
</font>[/QUOTE]D&D, in all its various gold-using fantasy incarnations, is just that, a fantasy setting. There must be a certain level of basic verisimilitude, but a good explanation will usually suffice to overcome the assumptions of the real world.
Such as race X valuing silver above gold for because it has undead slaying properties; but even this requires its consequences, with silver more common than gold, this would mean that outside parties could "buy out" the race's nations, unless silver were more rare.
A Science Fiction setting demands considerably more attention to verisimilitude and realism. (And yes, SF has a whole series of conventions that go along with it about what "impossible" things, like FTL travel (etc.), may be considered realistic and acceptable. Currency oddities are not one of those things, at least IMO.) Any explanation that is needed to overcome the assumptions of the real world must, of necessity (also IMO), be more substantial than any explanation that would suffice in a Fantasy setting.
The metal is used to plate jewelry (among many other things), so bullion/coinage isn't going to be a problem in the toxicity or radioactivity department. (Rhodium is a platinum group metal.)
</font>[/QUOTE]My apologies for misinterpreting the above statement.
You appear to be making the absolute assumption that asteroids are planetary core fragments.
At least for the asteroids in Sol system, this does not appear to be the case.
I'll give you that canon does assert that many asteroids belts are the results of Ancients War activity destroying worlds.
However, the majority of core fragments are going to be (if you accept classic notions of Terra's, and therefore similar worlds', cores) nickel/iron.
Having a world blown up is going to fling the majority of the planet's former mass out of the solar system (IMO). As for the total amount of core fragments that remain behind and happen to contain precious metals in sufficient amounts of economically exploitable concentrations, well, I just do not buy that there will be a "massive abundance" of these types of asteroids, so often, in so many systems, that their output will be able to supply the hypothetical metal-backed economy that the Imperium would require.
However, I do fully admit that there are such asteroids in world-shattered belts. I have described starsystems IMTU where minining activities occur on such asteroids. Just not in sufficient quantities to provide for an Imperial metal-backed economy.
I'd say you can structure your metals coinage system however you like. (In an actual game, it would largely be color, anyway.)
You might want to consider the effect on tramp freighter trade that would occur if such freighters have to use up actual freight dTons moving the ship's cash-supply from system to system.
Personally, I wouldn't make iridium more valuable than gold.
-------------------------------------
The volume of money flowing through the Imperium annually is in the quadrillions of credits. The USA's current economy in 2006 looks like a rickety stool beside an orbital elevator in comparison. The USA's economy couldn't hope to be backed directly by metals by a huge amount.
I suppose it might be posited that gold could exist in sufficient abundance to back the Imperial economy, but it would be difficult and expensive to transport, secure, and use.
People didn't abandon metal coinage for significant denominations of currency in favor of paper for no reason. Current attempts to reintroduce dollar coinage in the USA have not been considered successes.
RainOfSteel
SOC-14 1K
I was under the impression that gold and platinum weren't toxic.
RainOfSteel
SOC-14 1K
I personally would think so also, but canon asserts the opposite.
It is held that the central monetary supply control network of the Second Imperium is what caused the Long Night.
There is no central bank or monetary controls in the Imperium as a result of this . . . supposedly. (I modify this IMTU.)
Frankly I don't see how such a system could work. The Federal Reserve of the USA may be hated by conspiracy theorists, but the fact is there hasn't been a single nation-shattering bank failure since the Federal Reserve was implemented (although the Regan-induced Savings and Loan Crisis was a huge problem and hurt the the economy badly, it didn't shatter the nation).
You appear to be making the absolute assumption that asteroids are planetary core fragments.
At least for the asteroids in Sol system, this does not appear to be the case.
I'll give you that canon does assert that many asteroids belts are the results of Ancients War activity destroying worlds.
However, the majority of core fragments are going to be (if you accept classic notions of Terra's, and therefore similar worlds', cores) nickel/iron.
Having a world blown up is going to fling the majority of the planet's former mass out of the solar system (IMO). As for the total amount of core fragments that remain behind and happen to contain precious metals in sufficient amounts of economically exploitable concentrations, well, I just do not buy that there will be a "massive abundance" of these types of asteroids, so often, in so many systems, that their output will be able to supply the hypothetical metal-backed economy that the Imperium would require.</font>[/QUOTE]Planets do not typically explode by themselves, but stars do. There was an article in the September issue of Astronomy Magazine
You know that Gold, Platinum and other heavy metals are formed in supernova explosions, and supernovas leave pulsars behind and debris read asteroids behind, some of which go to form pulsar planets, this is right at the source where gold is made. If the Imperium mines its gold, its probably in places like this. You know that the energy of a supernova explosion would accelerate the lightest elements the quickest leaving behind the heaviest elements to form planets and asteroids orbiting the Pulsar. You don't need to blow up planets to get at the gold, large stars blow themselves up!
far-trader
SOC-14 10K
Thankfully a rare occurance locally or we wouldn't be having this discussion. Not one in all of the Imperium likely. And if there is one then the next nearest one is probably well outside the Imperium and in alien territory.
The nearest such source is likely to be about 400light years (that's our closest known one anyway)*. Or more than 20 weeks, one way, using J6, with no stops on the way. Figure closer to a 5 year trip one way to make it more realistic. If anyone goes as far as that to see what's there it won't be on the chance that there'll be gold to mine. No, the Imperium isn't going to be mining it's gold in the remnants of supernovae explosions.
Oh sure there may closer ones not yet discovered, but the very nature of them would seem to make them easy to find if they were very close. But let us for the sake of the Fiction argue that they are much more common and reduce the distance between pulsars from something on the order of 800 light years to just 10% of that, or 80 light years. And for convienience let's plonk one right in the middle of the Imperium. So how many more can we expect in the whole of the Imperium? About 4. There you go. With a wildly optimistic estimate the whole Imperium might have 5 pulsar systems. Is that enough for a gold based Imperial economy? I doubt it but it might have been enough in the early years and the Vilani being such they may have kept it as a standard of sorts. IF such systems actually have recoverable gold.
I say recoverable gold because the reason we can mine gold on earth is because it concentrates out in nice little packets. The gold in the remnants of a supernova I suspect will be trace amounts well mixed with everything else and you'll have to process a LOT of material to get out a bit of gold.
Pulsars are only the most active and youngest of neutron stars. the stars that make seutron stars are quite large and massive, they come out of stellar nurseries and they live short lives, the life of a neutron star is much longer, it only begins as a pulsar, but as its spinning slows down, it becomes less active and visible, but still nevertheless a neutron star just the same. For every active pulsar, their are probably several that are spinning not as rapidly, and many more that are just slow spinning neutron stars, they are small and dark, but in an active imperium their presence will be detected due to their gravitational influence. the material orbiting these dead pulsars will still be there. Some neutron stars will have a companion. The stars that make neutron stars are not common but their dead corpses do not decay and last much longer than the original stars main sequence, and on average their is one supernova event in our galaxy every century. It doesn't have to be an active pulsar, a dead neutron star will do just as well, and they are probably safer to go near for mining, as the "pulse" of a pulsar is quite deadly.
Spiderfish
SOC-12
In what way?
Not geographically, the asteriods are a long way off.
Not in composition, either (unless I totally misread the news stories about the recent asteroid probes, or more news came out I haven't seen).
</font>[/QUOTE]I assume he meant the core of the asteroid is closer to the asteroid's surface.
