Tyranomaster
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[Vol.4] Ch.35 A New Coin
🕑 Added 2024-01-15 17:59:01 +0000 UTCAll in all, I had about forty new goblins to teach at the academy. As it turned out, I had to modify my curriculum after the first week was finished. I've decided to merge the sixth day with the third day, so that all the evolution and prestige info is on one day. I then moved day five to day six as it's the last day before we have the different trade jobs come in to demonstrate, and it was covering those trades as an overview.
Then, day four will be extended to also go through day five. I figured with only about a decade worth of history it would take a day at most, but as it turns out, the goblins have a lot of questions, and there have been quite a few events of importance that have occurred. Considering this was the first trial week, I'd say it went pretty well overall, but there was obviously room for improvement.
I didn't have anyone stop in today to talk about evolution or abilities. That was to be somewhat expected however, as only the new goblins know about that offering right now. Others might have heard of it, but aren't sure if it's open to them as well. It technically is open to anyone to share info with me, but I'm not advertising that fact yet. I wanted this first time running the academy to be fairly free for me to focus on improvements of the actual academy, rather than also having to worry about recordkeeping.
When we get close to the next academic cycle in about seven weeks, I'll have info posted up at city hall related to it, so others know they can participate.
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The second week at the academy went quite well. The goblins seemed more keen to take on new jobs and to do something with their lives after having listened to the tales told by the older goblins, hobgoblins, and Karsh who all showed up for their trade presentations. Overall, I think that with our growing population, and the differences between development of demons compared to other races, this academy which can double function as a record keeping facility will work well.
Ultimately, we go through periods of rapid population growth followed by periods of no growth at all. By having the teaching role be dual purpose, it hopefully will help with job security for whomever is in charge of running the facility. I'd hate for their full time job to be teaching new goblins, only for us to go three years without expanding our population at all, and then we lose that skilled individual to another field. Plus, they're also supposed to teach the goblins about their own evolution and skills, so having them collect that data is actually related to their teaching job.
Either way, I finished up my work here, and went back up the mountain to finish work on the new room and then the precision lever. An added benefit that this lever arm provides is that it'll be a solid object, which means that if I use any precision tool in the future on one end, it'll still multiply that precision moving down the arm. The whole thing will essentially function as a pantograph for drawing, except it won't be completely free hand for obvious reasons.
I'll also need to get some rails and wheels made that I can secure to the rod that will act as the lever arm, as I'll need it to have very little friction when I'm rotating it. I'll also need a lock at the far end to prevent further rotation, and a pivot for the central axis of rotation. I'll also need to start artificially embedding crystals in the room to provide the light that I wanted. Larger crystals seem to produce a higher intensity of light, so I'm hoping I have enough of them for embedding. Otherwise I'll have to continue exploratory mining again for crystal pockets.
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After 20 days of work, I finished excavating the room where the giant lever arm will go. After another four days of embedding crystals, I realized I'd need more to light it the way I intended to. Basically, I'm short on the largest size crystals for the end of the room, and for the square front of the room. For the intermediate distance in the room, I should have enough medium sized crystals to give it enough of a glow on the floor that I don't need to worry about walking. Which means I'm going to be expanding the old exploratory shaft that also conveniently starts at the bottom of this cavern.
Before I dedicate some time to that though, I figured it would be a good idea to start minting the second batch of coins. We don't need it yet, but if our population continues to grow at this rate, then I want to be ready for it. Plus, I think we actually need to introduce a higher value coin.
For our current society, the coins are essentially fiat currency. They're worth money because we say they're worth a certain amount. We charge a flat amount for access to certain resources, and pay a certain amount for individuals to do jobs, setting the value of currency. Dwarven money by comparison seems to actually be valued based on the material used to make it. They seem to have a few different kinds of metal they use, and their coins are sized differently to indicate value. If we had access to more kinds of metal, I'd be all for that system, but lacking that, fiat will have to do.
For the new coin, I intend to make a new coin that is larger and thicker than all the existing coins, and make it out of our steel-like metal. I'm thinking that I'll put a picture of an ingot on one side of it, and a rough picture of our island as if it was viewed from above on the other side. Since all our coins have a hole in the center, the center of this view, the mountain and the peak will be missing, which is actually the only place that I can't view from above. I'm planning on setting this coin to be worth 10 of the other steel coin.
I hadn't quite expected that the goblins would be into wealth building, but for a while a few of them seemed like they'd force me to make more coins sooner than now. Thankfully, once the clothing and coin keeping fad died down, the goblins which had made a fortune slowly started to deplete said fortunes, and I didn't end up needing to do any emergency minting.
With an increase in the size of our society, there will also end up being a higher concentration of wealth in a few individuals, which means a higher maximum wealth. Which is why I'll need that larger coin. Each individual only needs so many of the smallest coins. It's inconvenient to keep an extreme number of them on hand, even if you're a merchant. So while the number of our copper coins necessary for our society scales linearly with population, the actual maximum wealth scales at an exponential rate. At least according to economic theory. The exponent might be low, but it's still exponential.
Which means that if the population quadruples, the total wealth held by all the goblins will be greater than four times the value, and that total will be primarily concentrated in a handful of individuals. If we only had the smallest two coins, we'd need to mint an ungodly number of coins. Instead, we'll simply print a bigger coin representing a larger value. It's also a bit of a deterrent against theft.
If a goblin has only been a laborer their whole life, only working on occasion, and they suddenly tried to exchange the largest coin, which is worth 2500 meals, that would be suspicious. Even more-so if one of those coins was reported missing. I'm not necessarily advocating for stratifying our society, but it does provide certain stability benefits by designing the system around it's inevitable existence.
I'll spend a few days collecting some native copper, then I'll return to the city and try to get Karsh to assist me in minting some new coins. I previously had some of the goblins help me with the task, but honestly Karsh will be much more effective than they are.
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After four days, I'd gathered enough copper to mint an estimated twenty thousand coins, distributed more in the larger of the two copper coins two to one. Enough to easily refill the vault I'd made and still have more that I'll need to sort. I then returned to the village and convinced Karsh to take a few days to come with me on the mountain to mint new coins. Much like the two goblins, I promised him some extra money in exchange for his silence. He said that it was unnecessary as I'd already provided them so much when it came to trade with the dwarven kingdom, but I insisted he take the pay to make his 'silence' official.
He and I then returned up the mountain, hauling as many ingots of our steel metal up with us as we could carry. I accessed my vault, and pulled the minting machines out, closing and hiding the vault behind me, then brought them up to mint coins with Karsh. For the next five days, all we did was mint coins. At the end of it, I paid Karsh two of the smaller steel coins as payment, and once he left, I spent an extra day reorganizing the vault.
The next day, I returned to the village with a cart full of coins, and repeated the process I've done in the past, where we carefully escorted all the coins to Zaka's house for safe storage and later distribution. For now, I only brought down five of the larger steel coins. I made 100, but the technical value of that is more than the entire existing economy, so those are being kept hidden away in the vault for now.
