That's not terrible. You just have to remember to make it a functional society. Let's see: littering etc. is probably a flat fine, which is more than the cost of cleanup. Speeding and other hazardous/antisocial behaviors are flat fines, but are reported out (including to insurance). Capitol crimes are probably percentages of your worth, with floors. There may be some weird interactions there where the richer you are, the more scrupulous you are, because you have more to lose (a hobo fined 110% of net worth, minimum 10 might be in for 10 years; a millionaire for 100k years). That's weird, but not necessarily bad. There's also a pseudo-egalitarian aspect: it's hard to enforce victimless crime laws on people who pay the fines and move on. As long as there's a heaping helping of social mobility, that makes it all functional enough to work with.Whatever wrote:A nice twist on that would be if the "service" in question was "getting out of one year of jail time". Then you could have all crimes effectively be fines (if you are rich), the government makes everything varying degrees of illegal, and paying the fines to stay out of jail is just a cost of doing business. The big businesses are by definition huge criminal enterprises. Rich people have bodyguards because robbery and assassination are merely expensive crimes.FrankTrollman wrote:If the government has a monopoly on the service, you don't actually have a currency peg, you just have a fiat currency and a listed price for a government service. The government can and does sell "forever stamps", and this is as close as you could get to a fixed price for a service. But it's still not the same as a currency peg.
-Username17
Radical criminals would include people who grow their own food without a license, artists who make their work available for free, etc.
Pegging Sci-fi Currencies to Services
Moderator: Moderators
Vebyast wrote:Here's a fun target for Major Creation: hydrazine. One casting every six seconds at CL9 gives you a bit more than 40 liters per second, which is comparable to the flow rates of some small, but serious, rocket engines. Six items running at full blast through a well-engineered engine will put you, and something like 50 tons of cargo, into space. Alternatively, if you thrust sideways, you will briefly be a fireball screaming across the sky at mach 14 before you melt from atmospheric friction.
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Foxwarrior
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And then an assassin is a hobo who "just happens" to be paid 20 years immediately after they receive their sentence. Net worth is a really awkward variable.
Of course, if you want to add to the "malicious prison state" vibe, you can let people work while in jail, for the generous wages of 1 year per year, and double all the fines to compensate.
Edit: Ooh, so the fiat aspect of this currency is that the government can choose to raise or lower their incarceration rates. Spooky. Edit Again: Fine, you still have the printing more option, unless that part is regulated by the starfish.
Of course, if you want to add to the "malicious prison state" vibe, you can let people work while in jail, for the generous wages of 1 year per year, and double all the fines to compensate.
Edit: Ooh, so the fiat aspect of this currency is that the government can choose to raise or lower their incarceration rates. Spooky. Edit Again: Fine, you still have the printing more option, unless that part is regulated by the starfish.
Last edited by Foxwarrior on Tue Oct 23, 2012 1:58 am, edited 2 times in total.
I think that would be handled by conspiracy charges. Alternately, you could toss in the death penalty for some things.
Vebyast wrote:Here's a fun target for Major Creation: hydrazine. One casting every six seconds at CL9 gives you a bit more than 40 liters per second, which is comparable to the flow rates of some small, but serious, rocket engines. Six items running at full blast through a well-engineered engine will put you, and something like 50 tons of cargo, into space. Alternatively, if you thrust sideways, you will briefly be a fireball screaming across the sky at mach 14 before you melt from atmospheric friction.