Let's talk about cash, baby. #27955
Comments
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I'm a big proponent of the old paper money idea, because it makes sense and also because I like the idea that the Free Merchants will actually buy money bundles from players at some reasonable rate. Common terms should be dollars, bucks, or bills (sometimes stamp-bucks or stamp-notes if someone needs to distinguish between an old US dollar bill and a Free Merchant Confirmed Note), but there should definitely be someone at the Free Merchants who is super insistent that they are "Free Merchant Confirmed Notes" and is pedantic about correcting people about it. I do think other factions should have different currencies. Kevin really likes the flattened coins, and it's just quirky enough that I think the Campus should use it. |
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I would imagine that they would go with the old paper money idea that I-am-Erk proposed as paper money is familiar and could offer some sense of normalcy that has been lost. |
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The Free Merchants almost certainly have economists on staff, since they're "6 busloads of office workers and soccer moms." So they're really aware of the difficulties you get when someone can bring in currency without actually bringing in wealth. So they're going to control the supply of currency, so someone can't bring in a security van's worth of banknotes and buy everything out of the Free Merchants' stock. We're already seeing that problem with cash cards, and that's something we're going to fix. The Free Merchants are going to control their currency, and if you want to buy a nice rifle scope from them, you'd best sell them something equally valuable. On the other hand, they don't want the money supply to be too tight, either. So they're willing to buy money bundles, but a stack of pre-Cataclysm bank notes aren't FM Confirmed Notes and you can't give them a large stack of $20s and get a rifle scope though you can probably get a couple of days of meat jerky. |
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I'm sure the pedants among the Free Merchants are willing to just call them "Confirmed Notes" or perhaps "C-notes". Edit: "merch" might be a really good nickname for them in the vernacular... I think a second reason the Merchants would be willing to buy out all old paper currency, besides making sure they have a stock of money for making more confirmed notes later, is that the rarer they make paper money in the area, the harder it gets for anyone to forge their currency. If they can buy out tons of paper money early on while it's common, they'll make it tough to find for forgery later.... and probably also earn goodwill from survivors who are annoyed to find their awesome pile of cash is largely useless. |
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So the economist will let you slide with C-Notes, but there's a Marketing guy among the office workers and he's insistent that you not dilute the brand name. |
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That seems reasonable yes. |
This only works with rechargeable batteries, the regular ones seem to be consumed upon use. Otherwise we should be able to produce them ourselves.
Books come to mind. Merchants would be in a good position to salvage a printing press (and also have interest in monopolising that technology if they are using paper money...), can reap a lot of personal economic benefit by controlling artificial scarcity through knowledge, and of course duplicate books are nigh worthless to the player adding an incentive to barter them for ones that have so far eluded you. The merchants would obviously copy down all information they consider important before passing on any book. |
Night-Pryanik
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NPC / Factions
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Do you think Survivor zombies could drop some C-Notes (% chance) as there is a chance they interacted with The Free Merchants when they were still alive? |
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Batteries: just because the players don't have a recipe to recharge batteries yet doesn't mean it's not possible. In my opinion the whole battery thing needs a bit of an overhaul. Survivor Z dropping Merch: not yet I think. Maybe later when we can determine if they're actually close to the free merchants and enough time has passed, but this isn't the accepted currency of the apocalypse unless you help the free merchants rise to a position of local dominance first. |
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Lore wise, I think the Merchants should be looking to create a new credit based fiat currency. That is to say that their currency should represent a debt that they owe to the holder and should be backed by nothing more than their good word. This means they can always have more cash if they need it because they can just make more (and go further into debt) and that they're always coming out ahead with regards to ensuring they get goods/services in exchange for their currency because the only way that their currency is given out is in return for goods/services. Likewise upon their currency being redeemed it would just be removed from circulation. For instance, let's imagine I go to sell a gun. The merchant is acting on behalf of the FM and so he's authorised to issue me with new currency from their reserve in return for the gun (along with a little for himself as commission). Now the FM are up a gun and down nothing but promises. They'll be happy to give me (or whoever else) other goods in exchange for my FM bucks because they know that they already got their gun in return. There's no way for them to ever end up giving out goods/services without getting something in return first. Implementation wise it just means they should never run out of cash (unless they physically run out of notes I guess). They should also be looking to make their notes easily destroyed. Every destroyed note is a debt they don't have to pay. If I sell a load of goods to them and then die before I spend the currency, they just got a bunch of free goods. If someone comes across my rain battered corpse a month later and recovers the currency then they have to pay out. Better for them to have notes that are destroyed by prolonged exposure to the elements. Having real material value behind the currency is really bad for them. Now even if I die and my stuff is never recovered they only break even. It also prevents them from going "overdrawn" where they issue more currency than they have goods hoping that it won't all be redeemed at once. The only reason for them to have a commodity currency is if they can't convince people to take their fiat currency. That said, people should be unwilling to take their fiat currency especially at first. Who knows if the Merchants will be here to pay their debts tomorrow? As for de facto commodities used as currency food seems the obvious answer, especially long lasting food. It's something everyone needs and it's fairly divisible. For instance in American prisons packets of noodles are the de facto currency even though they get free meals every day anyway. The Merchants would be fairly happy with this norm as well as they'd be the go to guys if you end up with more perishable food than you can eat. I like the idea of certified bank notes. Perhaps they're written in some sort of delible ink that washes away if they're left out in the rain leaving you with a normal bank note. In game terms I probably wouldn't do much more than wipe any c-notes left on your corpse if you die outside, but it's a nice piece of lore that they're trying to sneakily cash in on the dangerous and unregulated nature of the new world. They could also use cryptography to secure their notes. By writing a crypto signature of the note's serial number on the note they ensure that anyone with some simple hardware can verify a note, but only they can create new ones. This could also be expanded to a system where you can forge notes that have a bad signature easily and try to pass them off to people without the hardware to verify them. The Merchants would want to make and sell this hardware cheap to encourage the use of their currency and convince more people to accept it from them. This would require some implementation though. |
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I think either people would stick with the US Dollar, and/or just go back to trading items and not money. It's very unlikely that people would adopt a new currency, even after the cataclysm, because even though the US mint and government is dead for the most part, that doesn't mean people have to stop using the dollar. It'd also be much easier to just stick with the dollar, because adopting a new currency and making that currency known and recognized would be difficult, and even if people did adopt new currencies, they would vary from place to place. If that as the case, the people in Boston would pay in bottle caps, while the people in Providence would be paying in casino chips, and the people in Hartford would pay in arcade tokens. |
What you're describing are promissory notes, and the FM Confirmed Note is somewhere between a promissory note and a real currency. It has its origins in paying refugees in the center, for use as a food/water chit, but the creators (many of whom likely have economics degrees given the population of the center) were aware that it would almost immediately be used as a currency for other things and designed it with that in mind.
This is a good point, but there's a tight balance to it. They also want people to start adopting their currency. If a Merch note is known to be impossible to store and hard to get honoured, nobody is going to accept them, they'll just barter first. The notes have to be something survivors will trust as a reasonable currency that they can hold onto and bring back to be exchanged. That's why for a long time only people working very closely with or living in the refugee center are likely to accept them.
Precisely, and the merchants are well aware that their currency will not be widely accepted for some time. This is why they have specified commodities that they have a surplus of to be able to trade to survivors that would either have use for them or would recognize them as useful trade goods that other survivors would accept. My favourite example of this is a .22 cal bullet - it's not something so useful they can't part with it, but it's not useless either. Everyone is aware they'll be able to give someone else a box of small calibre bullets and get something in return. These are still good for killing zombies and game after all.
Actually, food is a tough one. Non perishable food is in too high of demand for them to be willing to trade it. The status quo at the beginning of the game is that the merchants aren't likely to sell you food for practically anything: if there's one thing they're desperately low on, it's sandwiches. Among other survivors, who may be able to make and raid more than they need, that's another matter. |
Given how easy it is for someone to wind up with 100,000 dollars or more just by breaking open an ATM or wandering into a busted armoured car, it's very unlikely the old-world cash has any meaningful value. With something like 1 in 10,000 people surviving, you'd need about 10,000 dollars to make up the equivalent of one old-world dollar. The giant wads of cash would be strictly impractical. |
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At this point I think I've got the feedback I need but people can still comment as desired |
Lore Discussion
The Free Merchants are a group that springs up out of the refugee center quite early on in the Cataclysm. US currency has lost all value, but they have a significant need for trade chits... even internally there's an immediate value to, for example, being able to give out a token for labour that can be traded for food, smokes, time on an arcade machine, whatever things might be limited and in demand - which is almost anything. This rapidly evolves into something that become of value for people trading regularly with the Free Merchants. From the player perspective, for example, many of the refugees will happily accept these tokens in exchange for goods and services.
The Issue
I'm about two PR's from allowing the player to pay for goods and services from refugee center citizens, and their preferred trade good is Free Merchant money. So, it behooves us to decide what exactly the free merchants use.
Certain items are certainly used as "universal trade goods". The Merchants don't expect everyone to be willing to accept their money, although if you're willing they'll happily accept it. I'd like to suggest the following things as items the Free Merchants will readily give to travelers in exchange for things like food and scrap metal and other stuff the Merchants need:
These items work for pseudo-currency trading with adventurers, but the actual Merchant money should be something else.
Here are some ideas:
Any other ideas?
Terminology
If we go with the stamped-note, what would some common terms for it be? I see the following being common.
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