An alchemist has created such a large surplus of gold that it's now worth less than its weight in dirt...

My brother's been shitposting and I got warned for it. Little shit doesn't know what's coming tomorrow.

You mean you don't already use paper money?

10 gp=1 cp
10 cp = 1 sp
100 sp = 1 pp

hmm... I see the problem now

Horses. They're so rare in all of our games, that no one actually rides them - they just buy any they come across and stash them in large safety deposit boxes.

Dank ass memes. Each meme is a fragment of a potential spell, Wizards use memefolders for magical R&D

I warned you about those Western alchemists bro. I fucking warned you.

You can trust a Taoist alchemist not to fuck up your economy. Fuck off into the mountains for years? Sure. Drink poison and wander about searching for immortality? Most definitely. Succeed and become a perpetually drunk immortal before floating off to heaven and a middle management position? Every time.

But changing all the lead in the kingdom into gold because "lol why not"? Nah man.

Salt. It's been used as a currency for ages, so why not just make it more prevalent?

Because how are you going to control the poor when any asshole next to the ocean can make salt for free?

Slaves

The problem with slaves as currency is the lack of granularity. A slave is worth more than a loaf of bread just from potential labor, and chopping bits off is a loss in total value.

Blow up the ocean, stupid.

silver

What's coming tomorrow?

Blood? It would prevent inflation and it is hard to falsificate.

Gold is just an abstraction of useful labor: it does nothing until modern electronics, and can't be efficiently mined without modern machinery, so every GP works its way down to x peasant-hours of pulling shiny rocks out of the ground or pebbles out of a stream for no use but shininess, making it similar to buttcoins which are based on proven labor time rather than a central government "we require n hours of compulsory labor, and issue these tokens worth fractions of an hour".

If alchemy exists and there are no rare metals, the currency becomes like Chinese spade or knife coins, where ablative farming tools are the currency roughly denominated in derived blacksmith-hours.

Gold, after sinking the gold deep in the ocean, together with the alchemist.

Gold, the material might be useless but your imperial might and surplus of trade goods should keep the currency afloat by defacto.

That didn't work for Spain.

How much was gold worth to begin with, anyway?
Are we talking D&D or RL? But either way, i think it's not that big of a deal, after the economy adjusts.
If the former it's not really a problem, silver would fill that niche both with bigger coins and a rise in value, given that its not alchemically reproducible and the trust in it remains.
If its the later its not in such widespread use that it would really affect day-to-day affairs for most people.

But i think cheap and plentiful gold would be a net-gain for the world, there are many applications where gold would be superior to whats available right now.

In a medieval setting, how do I tell human blood from animal blood?
In a magitek setting, how do I prevent "counterfeiters" spamming Cure Light Wounds on a peasant perpetually hooked up to a mason jar?

Iron

>there are many applications where gold would be superior to whats available right now.
I was thinking about that a little while ago and I thought of one application where I almost wonder why it hasn't actually been done: bullets. As far as I can tell, the only advantages lead has over gold are cost and a somewhat lower melting point, but gold has the advantages of very high density (even compared to lead) and non-reactivity. Am I missing something or would everyone be shooting gold bullets bullionets? at each other if it were as cheap as lead?

1) Medieval
Magic. This simply wouldn't work without it, blood isn't a very stable substance so you need magic anyway.
2)
You can't, but that wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing.
This would actually help to keep the prices level: If the price gets higher more people produce blood which lowers the price, if the value goes to low the magicians do something else.

>How much was gold worth to begin with, anyway?
Whatever anyone was willing to trade for it. It had value because it looked nice and was easy to work into decorative items, and became synonymous with wealth because the rich and powerful would trade for those things that looked nice and everyone wanted to look rich and powerful or gain favor with the rich and powerful. The scarcity of it helped maintain that mystique of wealth.

The peasantry is going to continue trading in the form in barter or other minor coinage they can afford, and a crash in gold value isn't going to affect them beyond letting them have nice shiny things in the house. Anyone with aspirations of nobility will continue to trade for artisanal gold crafts because it looks nice, but they're also going to be looking to collect scarcer items as an expression of their power and reach.

Gold might be a little TOO malleable and react to rifling by stripping rather than picking up a spin? Would be my guess for why it wouldn't work if it doesn't, and my "nope" explanation to players who run out of ammo in a dungeon and want to reshape their GP.

That only works in a theocracy with a ruthless inquisition, though. In any other situation the secular authority is ceding full control of minting to the clerics, who naturally will use it to make their setting's king a neutered appendage of their setting's pope or to overthrow him with a new popular heresy.

Think in any case about what any currency symbolizes (unfakeable labor, and to be fair human bone marrow's regenerative capacity IS unfakeable labor) and the effort governments go to to controlling its production.

Yeah, bullets would be one possible application for sure.
Basically anything that can be done with Lead (or Tin) you can do with Gold.
And with Gold actually being cheaper then dirt there are even more possibilities!
Anything that isn't load bearing or weight sensitive could and would be made from it.
Cups, dishes, toys, shingles, door frames etc.

Relative to lead, gold is more dense and harder. The difference is density probably isn't terribly significant beyond changing the design of the bullet and casing (need more propellant for same velocity, or less gold for same mass being delivered). The hardness means less deformation on impact however, and you'll see less damage to the target's internals. Gold also does not cause toxic reactions in the human body, so if some gets left inside after first aid they aren't going to die from poisoning.

I am not saying it would be wise for a king to switch to a blood backed currency.
But i don't get what you are saying here:
>Think in any case about what any currency symbolizes (unfakeable labor, and to be fair human bone marrow's regenerative capacity IS unfakeable labor)
I think in this context magic healing would be clearly unfakeable labor, and by a specialist at that.
In this setting a level 1 cleric spell would always be worth at least 1 pint of blood (Or how ever Cure light Wound regenerates)
I mean sure, the production is decentralized, but minting rights where more about the regulating the quality then quantity, and its not like rulers are only rich because they have gold mines.

but it's a specialist the secular authority has no control over, whereas the right to mint currency was always one of the primary rights of royalty and was often backed up by forced expropriation of mines. a blood-backed currency would perforce become a theocracy within a few years as either the secular kings enslaved the clerics while their troops were still loyal or a cult where even the village friar was rich beyond an emperor's imagination gained secular power through finances alone.

>Think in any case about what any currency symbolizes (unfakeable labor, and to be fair human bone marrow's regenerative capacity IS unfakeable labor) and the effort governments go to to controlling its production.
That's not what currency symbolizes though. Currency represents a store of value and a medium of exchange, and precious metal coins implicitly represent both by holding value as raw metal and being formed in a standard weight and purity. You can buy labor with coins, but the coins do not represent labor.

Modern fiat currency does not have any implicit worth and only holds value because everyone has faith that it does, and that's why governments go to such lengths to control it: loss of faith in a fiat currency means a death spiral as people stop using it and trade in other currencies instead.

But there is no value as raw metal other than "some warlord had nothing better to do with an untrained but strong peasant's labor than dig up 1GP a month". Its worth pre-electronics is entirely based on its rarity and prestige, which is entirely a function of how much spare labor is available to work the mines; see the GP's depreciation from D&D medieval standard-based 100 days of untrained labor (1cp a day) to the ca. 1900 average US wage of a week of average labor ($450 a year, a period gold piece held a face value of $10).

this is why fiat currency is MORE implicitly valuable than gold; any fiat currency will only stop being worth n minutes of unskilled labor in its country if that country's government decides to devalue, while any specie currency will dive in value (as happened in the 1500s following the Conquest, or in the late 1800s following the opening of Japan when Japanese merchants, in a traditionally gold-rich but isolated country, bought silver coin at a 1:5 rate instead of the west's 1:15 and suddenly US dollars devalued while dimes shot up as every seafaring ship on the west coast started hauling silver to Tokyo to bring back gold) whenever any country in the world has a surplus of gold, whether by lucky strikes, increasing labor allocations to the mines, or selling bullion to fund projects.

The only historical currency this DOESN'T apply to is Chinese spade and knife bronze pieces, which... surprise, were actual bronze spades and knives, which dulled and deformed with use, deriving their trade value from the miner and smith time necessary to replace them as necessary farming and cooking tools.

Of course it has value as raw metal. Even ignoring purely aesthetic or decorative uses, a soft metal like gold can be worked with simple tools to make bowls and pots to store food and drink, or buckles and clasps as fasteners for leather and cloth. Properly cast brass or bronze is of course better for those tasks, but it's not something you can do with just campfire.

D&D values aren't a good comparison because they never made sense to begin with. The historical value of gold did depreciate over time, but that was also because that scarcity which originally drove its value made it insufficient for the size of the growing economy. Fiat currency allows the economy to grow beyond the constraints of its physical reserves.

It's something you can do better than gold with literal dirt. You're hung up on something less useful than any riverbank because it's shiny, you insufficiently evolved marmot you.

Tokens to have sex with OP's mother.

Oh wait.

Fiat currency can crash from loss of faith all the time, see the Great Depression where the arbitrary value of stocks results in nation-wide unemployment. That didn't happen because the US Government decided to devalue the dollar.

Salt was a common historical currency for trade that found lots of value despite its labor cost being merely 'how hard is it to carry it inland from the sea'.

Grain or rice?

Make a coin worth X lbs/bushels of grain or rice, which can be directly converted at a merchant or a noble's estate?

Seems like it could work, and you could make your "coins" out of the now common Gold, as it's still a non-tarnishing easily workable metal.

What happens when you lose some to spoilage and there isn't enough in storage for the coins in circulation? Particularly in winter when you need that stored food to survive.

Might as well just hang onto the grain and trade it directly when necessary instead.

Nothing. Enslave alchemist go full post scarcity Omelas.

Debt

...

Well then, blood goes in small vials, wich would be like coins. To prevent the cure light wounds and all that, the vial would have to contain blood and semen at a specific proportion. Like those nickel-copper coins or something. And semen is not so easily farmeable I suppose.