So I was thinking today about money
To start with you have some chaps with some meat and berries and some other chaps with some pelts and hot sexy women (prehistoric hot sexy women) and they trade and everyone is happy.
Then one day some bloke has a bunch of shiny yellow stuff and another chap has a sharp piece of copper and so they trade again and then the bloke kills the chap and well the bloke has the sharp and the shiny.
Later on I hire you to whip my slaves but you dont want the cotton Im growing, I mean omgwtf would you do with it anyhow. So I give you some sterling and all is good. (this is hard currency, the value is absolute)
Then we come to the twentieth century and some twunk hands over small rectangular paper and in return gets whatever he can to help dull the pain of his miserable sod of a life. (This we shall call backed currency, the paper is almost valueless in and of its self but it represents something)
I missed a stage, there was a time when that valueless peice of paper actualy stood for a a real physical entity (namley gold and silver), today this is not the case, ie there is more money in circulation than acctual worth in sterling/gold backing.
EVE brings up an entirly new concept (well almost entirley new, the tech sector with its bubble burst around the mellinium was similar). In EVE the "government" (ie NPC and the devs) controll the amount of ISK in the economy. That is unless someone has an ISK printing machine
Anyway the money is completly digital and unbacked. If you need ISK you just go mine some ore and trade it for digital currency. They can return some of that ISK by charging for transactions and communications, but basicly the ISK has no physical form and therefore no value at all except as numerical representation of an items wealth.
Further thoughts:
To reign in on the civilian market the Empire sets price schemes for government sellers. CCP sets a base value for any object to be sold. They also set the amount of items released to market. Non government agents are allowed to sell items on the escrow market, and through the system market (or are these the same, example if I put a miner one up for sale does and NPC buy it or does a player buy it, or can an NPC buy it). In this respect objects become worth what people will pay for them, which has its own determinations but should hover fairly close to market value. What EVE is missing is consumable costs, at least at the small level (I guess anyone who manufactures would argue this with me, unless you can run a batch and then reconvert to minerals and rebatch). In RL we pay for food, fuel, rent DVDs, subscribe to games, ect. But in EVE we pay for what we get (excluding tax of course).
Thoughts for discussion:
1)What kind of monetary system is the system in EVE?
2)How do players effect the overall value of ISK, and similarly inflation?
3)Some people have claimed that market volatility is directly related to an overabundance of ISK in the game. Do you think they have a reasonable argument? Explain why or why not?
4)Would there ever be a way to fully hand the economy over to the player base? Why or why not?
5)Corporations have a share value listed when you view their information. What determines this value? Is there an EVE stock market?
If not, would it be plausable and/or worth while to set up an IPO system?
6)and lastly How long would Newsradio have continued if Phil Hartman had not died?
Also practically everyone uses so-called PIN cards to pay for just about anything, nobody ever uses checks, and cash typically only for amounts <$10. The system connects directly to your bank via a phone or DSL line and makes the transaction electronically as soon as you enter your 4 digit PIN and hit "OK", works great.
