The golden problem of Cidri

[DeadParrot]

Easy to forget today, but when TFT was originally written, there was no Internet. Any research on ancient monetary systems and values involved either being lucky enough to know someone that knew or journeying to the local library and spending hours or days researching the subject.

Or you could just make something up that was fairly simple and get on with writing the rest of the game.

On the inflation thing, I remember as a kid adjusting my candy purchases to keep under the amount where sales tax kicked in. About 8 cents IIRC.

[JohnPaulB]

Originally Posted by David Bofinger

The low price of gold and silver on Cidri is because the Mnoren like gold and silver and made sure there was lots of it about. I wonder, though, whether the supply of gold on Cidri, ample as it may seem, is finite.

On Earth we expect to exhaust mines, find new mines by exploration or by improving our mining technology, run as fast as we can to stay in one place and hope we don't stumble.

On Cidri none of that is happening: societies have been around a while, technology isn't really improving. So we should be running out of valuable and easily accessed ores. Unless there are Mnoren machines still making more?

One of the byproducts of Alchemy's Philospher Stone is turning base metals into gold. So there would be a low quantity of gold being 'created' all the time.

[EKB]

Originally Posted by TippetsTX

I prefer a 100:1 silver-to-gold ratio.

That's what I ended up settling on as well.

The handwave / in-setting justification I used is that the silver-to-gold ratio was originally 10:1, but then shifted over time to 100:1, with 'gold' coins becoming more and more debased until they were less than 10% gold, with the remainder being close to equal proportions of silver and copper. Then caches of "old" gold coins were discovered and started to circulate at a ratio of 100 silver to each old-gold coin. The debased coins started to be referred to as 'electrum' pieces, and new, un-debased gold coins started to be minted with a face value of 100 silver dollars.