TL;DR Obsidian is better than diamond when paying for labor, because you can't hack to get more. I need you guys to time how many obsidian you can mine, and how long it took. Mining method used would be nice too.
Our SMP server (and indeed most 'survival' servers) has been having some difficulty with establishing a fair currency to use when 'hiring' people to help with personal projects - things like building big walls, or digging out large rooms. Diamonds and iConomy money are ok, but they're 'corruptable' currencies. Besides being a function of luck, hacking mods like zombe and xray can give some players a steep advantage over those who don't hack. Even without such tools, diamond or gold is highly variable, depending largely on luck and technique. After some consideration, I've concluded that Obsidian, and not diamond, is the fairest item to pay people with when they're performing mundane tasks like those mentioned above. Here's why:
If I do an hour of labor for you, and you pay me with a certain amount of obsidian, I know that you either spent an hour of your own time mining it, or you did an hour of work for somebody else. Hacking, luck, or skill didn't give you any advantage over me; if you overcharged someone, or they overpaid for a job, the loss is confined to them (and their time), and not to the currency itself. To get an hour of work from someone, you need to do an hour of work.
I go into much more detail in my original post (warning, long read!), but the idea of using obsidian is probably the most sound solution. If the average miner is able to mine 135 obsidian per hour, then an hour of 'time' becomes worth 135 obsidian.
In order to determine what this 'fair' wage is, I need people to time themselves mining obsidian, and report back to here with what they found. I will need the number of obsidian mined, the number of minutes spent, and the technique used. This figure should include time spent harvesting the obsidian itself (with your pick), as well as any setup time like transporting lava to a trench, pouring water, etc. Do not count time spent traveling to the lava pool, or building a redstone converter. If you're not accustomed to mining obsidian, read the Minecraft wiki article on obsidian, and perhaps spend some time practicing before you do your actual 'timed run' to warm up and work out any kinks. Use a stopwatch utility to keep track (I use this one). The actual amount of time you spend doesn't matter as long as you accurately report the number of minutes spent. The longer you work on it the better (an hour or more is ideal), and if a lava pool dries up before you're satisfied, stop the timer until you find the next one (and set up any trenches). As for technique, I know of only 5 techniques:
[*:ph2py4aj]Redstone - Uses a little known feature to convert redstone into obsidian. See obsidian wiki.
[*:ph2py4aj]Trench - Lava is poured by the bucket into a trench, converted, and mined from there.
[*:ph2py4aj]Deep Pool - Lava is converted where it is, using water to convert newly exposed obsidian. Risky, but efficient.
[*:ph2py4aj]Shallow pool - Same as above, except lava pools are selected to be only one or two deep. Most efficient, but rare.
[*:ph2py4aj]Gate - If nether is available, you can make a gate appear in one world, mine it, then repeat. Very inefficient, even with warps.
If you have any other ones, describe them briefly with your post.
Here's my results so far, with 3 data points all using trench mining:
Hourly average: 121/Hr (StdDev = 27%)
Linear Regression: 132/Hr (R2 = 0.93)
I think this idea might help a lot of other servers, and I'll be sure to keep the rate updated so it can be used. Cheers.
I hate mining obsidian, though, so it would suck if this caught on.
People hate working too, but they benefit from having money. The idea is that people's time, especially when spent doing something boring like digging big holes for someone else's benefit, has real value. By tying this value to an in-game item like diamonds, this currency can be corrupted by hacks like xray mods, as well as instability caused by the 'luck factor', making such exchanges potentially very unfair.
Because obsidian mining is predictable and so time consuming, it helps to 'level the playing field' and act as a storage medium for time- something that can't be forged as easily as diamond or other 'quantity-style' items. In essence, the 'suffering' of mining obsidian can be traded on an equitable level for the 'suffering' of working on someone else's personal project. Once enough players on a server have plenty of obsidian stocked up, it becomes possible to get a bunch of it by working for other players, instead of mining it yourself. You can then use the obsidian you earned to hire an equal amount of labor from others. Of course, if you don't intend to hire anyone, you don't have to bother with it all; the point is to avoid situations where someone is being paid to do 2 hours of work, when the employer only spent 30 minutes collecting the fee.
Does hacking materials work differently in multiplayer? I play singleplayer with TooManyItems and while I don't use it to just go willy nilly with stack after stack of hard to acquire materials, I could if I chose use it to give myself a stack of obsidian blocks as easily as I could give myself a stack of diamonds.
Again, milage in multiplayer may vary, I know nothing about multiplayer...but I don't see it as an unabusable currency.
Speed, well the wiki says it takes 15 seconds to mine one block with a diamond pickaxe.
1.If i took an hour to mine obby, then gave it to someone who spent an hour digging a hole for me, Why didn't I just dig it in the first place with that hour i used to mine obby?
2. Obby is not as useful as Diamonds, and now with power rails, Gold. People always want diamond tools, and new power rails take a lot of gold to cover long distances.
3. using diamonds and gold uses less space :tongue.gif:
1.If i took an hour to mine obby, then gave it to someone who spent an hour digging a hole for me, Why didn't I just dig it in the first place with that hour i used to mine obby?
2. Obby is not as useful as Diamonds, and now with power rails, Gold. People always want diamond tools, and new power rails take a lot of gold to cover long distances.
3. using diamonds and gold uses less space :tongue.gif:
I just don't see it as a good idea :sad.gif:
You have completely missed the point of OP. The point is to use obby as a currency. Therefore,
1) I will not want to take an hour to mine obby as i can mine an hour to get obby for that poor guy and force others to mine an hour for me.
also, obsidian as currency will still be advantaged to people who give themselves hacked diamonds for diamond picks to get obsidian, vs people who only use diamonds they mine for themselves.
Which ends up at the original stated problem, that diamonds are not a good currency since they can be hacked. The activities diamonds enable (like chopping up blocks of obsidian) will be subject to the same problem.
also, obsidian as currency will still be advantaged to people who give themselves hacked diamonds for diamond picks to get obsidian, vs people who only use diamonds they mine for themselves.
Which ends up at the original stated problem, that diamonds are not a good currency since they can be hacked. The activities diamonds enable (like chopping up blocks of obsidian) will be subject to the same problem.
OP suggested a situation where hacking is not possible but Xraying is. Either way, a player will still need 15 seconds to mine a block of obby, unless they hire men using obby to chop obby.
Obsidian is a very interesting concept to use as the cornerstone of your economy. I see that you are basing it on the concept of 'Time value of money'. This concept works very very well, until you get a few super rich players. The end result is that the super-rich will just buy out everyone else, and then put the items back on the market at twice (or more) their original value. This, in turn, will lead to inflation.
Now, if you could just figure out a way to 'lock-in' the value of that economy? The beauty of a game is that you can make infinite sources, whereas in real life, you cannot. So, an easy solution would be to just create (or modify) a plugin that will supply obsidian to the players in exchange for set amounts of goods. Then give that system an infinite supply, which prevents the super-rich from cornering the market.
There are of course other things that need to be considered as well, such as if it is more valuable to sell to players, or if the economy will be even to the plugin and the players. Then you also have to make sure you did not miss any loopholes, such as items that can be easily replicated (reeds, cactus), and the list goes on...
I'm not seeing anyone accepting payment of obsidian for mining obsidian. There is an obvious middleman who can be removed from that transaction. People generally trade what they have/produce for something they don't/can't have or produce.
I'm not seeing anyone accepting payment of obsidian for mining obsidian. There is an obvious middleman who can be removed from that transaction. People generally trade what they have/produce for something they don't/can't have or produce.
You seem to missing a lot of the points. If I hire you to mine an hour of obsidian, and I'm paying you and hour of obsidian, you may as well just mine it on your own. In the case of a super rich player, they either had to do a lot of obsidian mining, or done a lot of work for someone. While the initial mining of obsidian is essentially 'working for the void', anyone can do it, and everyone gets pretty much the same return. As far as exchanging it for more useful items like diamond for tools, that's between buyer and seller; the actual time that the obsidian represents remains constant. I cover most of your questions in depth in my original thread.
The idea of using obsidian as currency is interesting, but I do not think it would be successful long-term.
The thing with currency is it has to have some kind of intrinsic value. Obsidian is only useful for building things out of obsidian. Most people don't build out of obsidian, because it's not very good looking and dark and hard to get. On top of its questionable desirability, once obsidian is created, it's not normally consumed - it can only be destroyed by dropping it in lava. The only real difference between obsidian and dirt is how common dirt is.
So, over time, the amount of obsidian in the world will increase. Some of it will be used to build things, but the option to destroy those things to get the obsidian back still exists. Not all of it will be used to build, of course, if the idea is to get people to hold it as currency. People will end up having stacks of obsidian that are essentially only good for trading. As time goes on, there is more and more obsidian, and so the value attached to it will decrease. This is the essence of inflation.
This is why diamonds make much better currency. Diamonds are highly desirable for diamond tools. Using diamond tools saves you lots of time. Time has real value. Plus, diamond is consumed when used. This means diamond will never become very common.
So your only hope for using obsidian as currency is to have a system for consuming it. Maybe there's a special shop that lets you trade obsidian for diamonds, or for some other item or benefit that is consumable and highly desirable. Maybe obsidian tools could be added to the game, and those tools could be as fast as diamond, but with half the durability and without the ability to mine obsidian.
The thing with currency is it has to have some kind of intrinsic value. Obsidian is only useful for building things out of obsidian.
It does have value. More correctly, it gains a new value. Sure you did an hour of work (for another player, or to the void), but either way you still have a big pile of Obsidian. You might be able to build a vault (which would be as labor intensive to build anyway), but if people are trading time for obsidian, that pile is now worth an hour of time to you. You can hire someone with it, and get that canal built twice as fast, or if someone else needs their own project done they can buy it off you for a fair price like 15 diamonds or whatever seems fair to both of you.
You later argue that it might become too common or too rare. If you have a huge pile of obsidian, like 2000 for example, you had to have done a lot of work to get it. At 150/hr, that 2000 represents about 13 hours of work that you have done. It can also be traded for 13 hours of work from other people. If someone else needs or wants more(and the power it brings) they can either mine it themselves, or work for you; the latter, I assume, being the more enjoyable option. As far a building base improvements, they have value either way. A vault might be expensive, and effectively non-returnable, but so is adding an extension to your house in real life. Your real-world time earned you real-world money, and improved your real-world house by an equivalent amount. All told you traded time for an improved house. Same as in game.
It isn't inflationary, because it acts as a store of time. Even if everyone has a lot of 'time stored up', the need of help from others balances it. If someone wants to do 5 hours of work, you're not gonna give them 5000 obsidian instead of 750 because you spent 33 hours doing something to get that amount. Diamond is similar, but it's vulnerability to hacks and high variability make it too unstable for this purpose.
It isn't inflationary, because it acts as a store of time. Even if everyone has a lot of 'time stored up', the need of help from others balances it.
No, it's not a "store of time", because once the obsidian is mined it can be traded an infinite number of times. That is why it IS inflationary.
Diamonds are an actual "store of time" because each time you mine with a diamond pick you are saving a significant fraction of a second over the time it would take using a common stone pick. The diamond goes away and you gain time. Therefore, diamonds are not inflationary.
So IF you create a way for obsidian to be consumed in a way that gives a player back the time invested in mining it, THEN you can use obsidian as a currency in a sensible manner.
In case you still don't get it, let me try an analogy.
Suppose a small enclave of crazies decided to go so completely off the grid that they rejected all modern currency. No more dollars. Now, they're ok with the idea of trade and currency, they just want to be disconnected from the rest of the world. More power to them.
So one of their leaders has a bright idea for how to handle their currency. Basically, currency is supposed to represent a unit of labor. So they decided that if you want to go pound sand for an hour, you'll earn a certificate that says you pounded sand for an hour. That certificate would be good for trade, and everyone in the cult agrees that the certificates have value. If you run out of money, you just have to go pound sand, and suddenly you have more money.
So at first, the certificates would have value because everybody agreed that they did. But once created, the certificates remain in circulation. And there is really no other use for them. The savvy traders would get rich and have tons of certificates, showing how much sand had been collectively pounded.
As the non-savvy ones kept running out of money and pounding more sand, more useless certificates would be created. Now the rich ones, who already had thousands of certificates, would become really unimpressed with just a few certificates. They would raise their prices. Everyone else, disgusted with the price increases, would eventually realize the worthlessness of a certificate that said you pounded sand for an hour, would instead start bartering and no longer care about the currency.
So you can see where this is going, right? A whole lot of sand gets pounded and eventually the certificates are more useful as kindling than as currency.
No, it's not a "store of time", because once the obsidian is mined it can be traded an infinite number of times.
What are you trading it for? Time. Let's say you start with 1 hour worth of obsidian, and you hire somebody with it for one hour, and they do work on your canal system.
You started with an hour of obsidian, which you spent time to get. You ended with no obsidian, but with an hour of 'construction results'. You neither gained nothing nor lost anything. You simply converted your obsidian (time stored) into construction work (time spent).
As for your employee, they did an hour of work, and got an hour of obsidian in return. They started with an hour of time (in potentia), and ended with an hour of obsidian (time in potentia). Thus they converted their time into obsidian.
You had the initial obsidian based on the merit of the time you had to spend getting it. You lost the obsidian, and hence the work you put into getting it, but in return you got the time your employee put into your project. You didn't profit at all, and neither did they; but what you each got from the transaction is roughly equivalent to what you each 'put in'. The obsidian simply acted to 'store' the initial time you spent getting it, so it could be traded for the time of your employee. They now have the obsidian, and the time it represents. If they were to hire someone, they would thus be trading their newly-acquired obsidian for their employees time. In this 3 player scenario, you're out an hour of time (mining the obsidian), but you have an hour of time back (in the form of a better canal). Your employee is out an hour of time (spent on your project), but they have an hour back in the form of their own project. Their employee is out an hour of time as well, but they still have that time, in the form of obsidian.
When looking at the system as a whole, time is added to the system by mining obsidian; it is then removed from the system in the form of construction projects. The obsidian acts to store the time spent mining it, and acts as medium of exchange to trade time between people. Sure you could work on your project for an hour instead of mining obsidian, but what if you don't know what your next project is? Or you're available to help someone, but don't trust that they worked hard enough to earn what they're paying you?
You argue that there is inflation, because 3 hours of value now exist from one hour of obsidian- your project, your employees project, and the obsidian itself. However, to get that value 3 hours have been expended- your time spent mining it initially, your employees time spent working for you, and their employees time spent working. Because obsidian's existence is a function of time (at least in item form), is a zero-sum system; perfect for a currency. There's some inefficiencies, but on average they tend to be far less variable than with diamond mining.
The issue is thus whether or not the hour you spent mining obsidian is 'equivalent' to the hour your employee spent working on your canal. Both are mundane tasks, and both took an hour to do. You both lost an hour you could have spent doing something else, so you're on equal footing. And that 2 hours have yielded a better canal, as well as some currency (which, again, is a stored time which can be invested later). All told you two each spent an hour of work, and produced both an 'hour of canal' and an hour of 'stored time' in the form of obsidian. That 'stored time' might not be able to help you mine stone faster, but you can trade it for diamonds which can be. Or you can hire someone to mine diamonds for you.
With your 'sand pounding' example you suggest that the actors are getting something of value (certificates worth people's time) for nothing (time spend pounding sand). But that time spent pounding sand IS worth something. You could have built a house instead, or harvested crops. Sand pounding might not be a viable 'value creator' in real life, but in the case of minecraft the obsidian acts less like a 'store of time' and more of a 'store of time spent suffering'. If I work on your canal against my will (after a fashion), at least I'm suffering in exchange for something that you suffered to get; we've both got something valuable (a canal, and a certificate good for renting the 'suffering') of others, and we both had to work/suffer for the same amount of time to get it. Same amount of time invested, same amount back.
Diamond also converts time into items, but fails as a fair currency because although good for slightly better tools, the same amount of time invested doesn't always yield similar numbers of diamonds. You might be a better miner than me, but If I start cheating I can really rip you off. Whether you use obsidian or diamond, they each represent an amount of time invested, but with obsidian that amount of time is far more regular, and more resistant to outside influences like luck or cheating.
The argument is going in circles... I say try it and see if it works. :smile.gif:
But isn't the hackability of diamonds nullified with that server (or was it bukkit?) plugin that stops xray from working? I can't remember where I saw it, but it modifies the server to send all underground ores to the client as stone. The server keeps track of what's actually there though, and changes it back as soon as it's exposed to air. So people can xray all they want but they can't see anything until they actually mine it.
Unless I'm thinking of a different problem, doesn't that solve the issue with diamonds as currency?
Our SMP server (and indeed most 'survival' servers) has been having some difficulty with establishing a fair currency to use when 'hiring' people to help with personal projects - things like building big walls, or digging out large rooms. Diamonds and iConomy money are ok, but they're 'corruptable' currencies. Besides being a function of luck, hacking mods like zombe and xray can give some players a steep advantage over those who don't hack. Even without such tools, diamond or gold is highly variable, depending largely on luck and technique. After some consideration, I've concluded that Obsidian, and not diamond, is the fairest item to pay people with when they're performing mundane tasks like those mentioned above. Here's why:
If I do an hour of labor for you, and you pay me with a certain amount of obsidian, I know that you either spent an hour of your own time mining it, or you did an hour of work for somebody else. Hacking, luck, or skill didn't give you any advantage over me; if you overcharged someone, or they overpaid for a job, the loss is confined to them (and their time), and not to the currency itself. To get an hour of work from someone, you need to do an hour of work.
I go into much more detail in my original post (warning, long read!), but the idea of using obsidian is probably the most sound solution. If the average miner is able to mine 135 obsidian per hour, then an hour of 'time' becomes worth 135 obsidian.
In order to determine what this 'fair' wage is, I need people to time themselves mining obsidian, and report back to here with what they found. I will need the number of obsidian mined, the number of minutes spent, and the technique used. This figure should include time spent harvesting the obsidian itself (with your pick), as well as any setup time like transporting lava to a trench, pouring water, etc. Do not count time spent traveling to the lava pool, or building a redstone converter. If you're not accustomed to mining obsidian, read the Minecraft wiki article on obsidian, and perhaps spend some time practicing before you do your actual 'timed run' to warm up and work out any kinks. Use a stopwatch utility to keep track (I use this one). The actual amount of time you spend doesn't matter as long as you accurately report the number of minutes spent. The longer you work on it the better (an hour or more is ideal), and if a lava pool dries up before you're satisfied, stop the timer until you find the next one (and set up any trenches). As for technique, I know of only 5 techniques:
[*:ph2py4aj]Redstone - Uses a little known feature to convert redstone into obsidian. See obsidian wiki.
[*:ph2py4aj]Trench - Lava is poured by the bucket into a trench, converted, and mined from there.
[*:ph2py4aj]Deep Pool - Lava is converted where it is, using water to convert newly exposed obsidian. Risky, but efficient.
[*:ph2py4aj]Shallow pool - Same as above, except lava pools are selected to be only one or two deep. Most efficient, but rare.
[*:ph2py4aj]Gate - If nether is available, you can make a gate appear in one world, mine it, then repeat. Very inefficient, even with warps.
If you have any other ones, describe them briefly with your post.
Here's my results so far, with 3 data points all using trench mining:
Hourly average: 121/Hr (StdDev = 27%)
Linear Regression: 132/Hr (R2 = 0.93)
I think this idea might help a lot of other servers, and I'll be sure to keep the rate updated so it can be used. Cheers.
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People hate working too, but they benefit from having money. The idea is that people's time, especially when spent doing something boring like digging big holes for someone else's benefit, has real value. By tying this value to an in-game item like diamonds, this currency can be corrupted by hacks like xray mods, as well as instability caused by the 'luck factor', making such exchanges potentially very unfair.
Because obsidian mining is predictable and so time consuming, it helps to 'level the playing field' and act as a storage medium for time- something that can't be forged as easily as diamond or other 'quantity-style' items. In essence, the 'suffering' of mining obsidian can be traded on an equitable level for the 'suffering' of working on someone else's personal project. Once enough players on a server have plenty of obsidian stocked up, it becomes possible to get a bunch of it by working for other players, instead of mining it yourself. You can then use the obsidian you earned to hire an equal amount of labor from others. Of course, if you don't intend to hire anyone, you don't have to bother with it all; the point is to avoid situations where someone is being paid to do 2 hours of work, when the employer only spent 30 minutes collecting the fee.
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Again, milage in multiplayer may vary, I know nothing about multiplayer...but I don't see it as an unabusable currency.
Speed, well the wiki says it takes 15 seconds to mine one block with a diamond pickaxe.
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1.If i took an hour to mine obby, then gave it to someone who spent an hour digging a hole for me, Why didn't I just dig it in the first place with that hour i used to mine obby?
2. Obby is not as useful as Diamonds, and now with power rails, Gold. People always want diamond tools, and new power rails take a lot of gold to cover long distances.
3. using diamonds and gold uses less space :tongue.gif:
I just don't see it as a good idea :sad.gif:
You have completely missed the point of OP. The point is to use obby as a currency. Therefore,
1) I will not want to take an hour to mine obby as i can mine an hour to get obby for that poor guy and force others to mine an hour for me.
2) Who says obby is useful? o.o
3) No, it takes the same space.
Which ends up at the original stated problem, that diamonds are not a good currency since they can be hacked. The activities diamonds enable (like chopping up blocks of obsidian) will be subject to the same problem.
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OP suggested a situation where hacking is not possible but Xraying is. Either way, a player will still need 15 seconds to mine a block of obby, unless they hire men using obby to chop obby.
You can mine obsidian by beating on it with obsidian? Never tried that...
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Nop, I meant it as 'hiring other players using obsidian as a currency to obtain obsidian for you'.
Now, if you could just figure out a way to 'lock-in' the value of that economy? The beauty of a game is that you can make infinite sources, whereas in real life, you cannot. So, an easy solution would be to just create (or modify) a plugin that will supply obsidian to the players in exchange for set amounts of goods. Then give that system an infinite supply, which prevents the super-rich from cornering the market.
There are of course other things that need to be considered as well, such as if it is more valuable to sell to players, or if the economy will be even to the plugin and the players. Then you also have to make sure you did not miss any loopholes, such as items that can be easily replicated (reeds, cactus), and the list goes on...
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You seem to missing a lot of the points. If I hire you to mine an hour of obsidian, and I'm paying you and hour of obsidian, you may as well just mine it on your own. In the case of a super rich player, they either had to do a lot of obsidian mining, or done a lot of work for someone. While the initial mining of obsidian is essentially 'working for the void', anyone can do it, and everyone gets pretty much the same return. As far as exchanging it for more useful items like diamond for tools, that's between buyer and seller; the actual time that the obsidian represents remains constant. I cover most of your questions in depth in my original thread.
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The thing with currency is it has to have some kind of intrinsic value. Obsidian is only useful for building things out of obsidian. Most people don't build out of obsidian, because it's not very good looking and dark and hard to get. On top of its questionable desirability, once obsidian is created, it's not normally consumed - it can only be destroyed by dropping it in lava. The only real difference between obsidian and dirt is how common dirt is.
So, over time, the amount of obsidian in the world will increase. Some of it will be used to build things, but the option to destroy those things to get the obsidian back still exists. Not all of it will be used to build, of course, if the idea is to get people to hold it as currency. People will end up having stacks of obsidian that are essentially only good for trading. As time goes on, there is more and more obsidian, and so the value attached to it will decrease. This is the essence of inflation.
This is why diamonds make much better currency. Diamonds are highly desirable for diamond tools. Using diamond tools saves you lots of time. Time has real value. Plus, diamond is consumed when used. This means diamond will never become very common.
So your only hope for using obsidian as currency is to have a system for consuming it. Maybe there's a special shop that lets you trade obsidian for diamonds, or for some other item or benefit that is consumable and highly desirable. Maybe obsidian tools could be added to the game, and those tools could be as fast as diamond, but with half the durability and without the ability to mine obsidian.
It does have value. More correctly, it gains a new value. Sure you did an hour of work (for another player, or to the void), but either way you still have a big pile of Obsidian. You might be able to build a vault (which would be as labor intensive to build anyway), but if people are trading time for obsidian, that pile is now worth an hour of time to you. You can hire someone with it, and get that canal built twice as fast, or if someone else needs their own project done they can buy it off you for a fair price like 15 diamonds or whatever seems fair to both of you.
You later argue that it might become too common or too rare. If you have a huge pile of obsidian, like 2000 for example, you had to have done a lot of work to get it. At 150/hr, that 2000 represents about 13 hours of work that you have done. It can also be traded for 13 hours of work from other people. If someone else needs or wants more(and the power it brings) they can either mine it themselves, or work for you; the latter, I assume, being the more enjoyable option. As far a building base improvements, they have value either way. A vault might be expensive, and effectively non-returnable, but so is adding an extension to your house in real life. Your real-world time earned you real-world money, and improved your real-world house by an equivalent amount. All told you traded time for an improved house. Same as in game.
It isn't inflationary, because it acts as a store of time. Even if everyone has a lot of 'time stored up', the need of help from others balances it. If someone wants to do 5 hours of work, you're not gonna give them 5000 obsidian instead of 750 because you spent 33 hours doing something to get that amount. Diamond is similar, but it's vulnerability to hacks and high variability make it too unstable for this purpose.
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No, it's not a "store of time", because once the obsidian is mined it can be traded an infinite number of times. That is why it IS inflationary.
Diamonds are an actual "store of time" because each time you mine with a diamond pick you are saving a significant fraction of a second over the time it would take using a common stone pick. The diamond goes away and you gain time. Therefore, diamonds are not inflationary.
So IF you create a way for obsidian to be consumed in a way that gives a player back the time invested in mining it, THEN you can use obsidian as a currency in a sensible manner.
Suppose a small enclave of crazies decided to go so completely off the grid that they rejected all modern currency. No more dollars. Now, they're ok with the idea of trade and currency, they just want to be disconnected from the rest of the world. More power to them.
So one of their leaders has a bright idea for how to handle their currency. Basically, currency is supposed to represent a unit of labor. So they decided that if you want to go pound sand for an hour, you'll earn a certificate that says you pounded sand for an hour. That certificate would be good for trade, and everyone in the cult agrees that the certificates have value. If you run out of money, you just have to go pound sand, and suddenly you have more money.
So at first, the certificates would have value because everybody agreed that they did. But once created, the certificates remain in circulation. And there is really no other use for them. The savvy traders would get rich and have tons of certificates, showing how much sand had been collectively pounded.
As the non-savvy ones kept running out of money and pounding more sand, more useless certificates would be created. Now the rich ones, who already had thousands of certificates, would become really unimpressed with just a few certificates. They would raise their prices. Everyone else, disgusted with the price increases, would eventually realize the worthlessness of a certificate that said you pounded sand for an hour, would instead start bartering and no longer care about the currency.
So you can see where this is going, right? A whole lot of sand gets pounded and eventually the certificates are more useful as kindling than as currency.
What are you trading it for? Time. Let's say you start with 1 hour worth of obsidian, and you hire somebody with it for one hour, and they do work on your canal system.
You started with an hour of obsidian, which you spent time to get. You ended with no obsidian, but with an hour of 'construction results'. You neither gained nothing nor lost anything. You simply converted your obsidian (time stored) into construction work (time spent).
As for your employee, they did an hour of work, and got an hour of obsidian in return. They started with an hour of time (in potentia), and ended with an hour of obsidian (time in potentia). Thus they converted their time into obsidian.
You had the initial obsidian based on the merit of the time you had to spend getting it. You lost the obsidian, and hence the work you put into getting it, but in return you got the time your employee put into your project. You didn't profit at all, and neither did they; but what you each got from the transaction is roughly equivalent to what you each 'put in'. The obsidian simply acted to 'store' the initial time you spent getting it, so it could be traded for the time of your employee. They now have the obsidian, and the time it represents. If they were to hire someone, they would thus be trading their newly-acquired obsidian for their employees time. In this 3 player scenario, you're out an hour of time (mining the obsidian), but you have an hour of time back (in the form of a better canal). Your employee is out an hour of time (spent on your project), but they have an hour back in the form of their own project. Their employee is out an hour of time as well, but they still have that time, in the form of obsidian.
When looking at the system as a whole, time is added to the system by mining obsidian; it is then removed from the system in the form of construction projects. The obsidian acts to store the time spent mining it, and acts as medium of exchange to trade time between people. Sure you could work on your project for an hour instead of mining obsidian, but what if you don't know what your next project is? Or you're available to help someone, but don't trust that they worked hard enough to earn what they're paying you?
You argue that there is inflation, because 3 hours of value now exist from one hour of obsidian- your project, your employees project, and the obsidian itself. However, to get that value 3 hours have been expended- your time spent mining it initially, your employees time spent working for you, and their employees time spent working. Because obsidian's existence is a function of time (at least in item form), is a zero-sum system; perfect for a currency. There's some inefficiencies, but on average they tend to be far less variable than with diamond mining.
The issue is thus whether or not the hour you spent mining obsidian is 'equivalent' to the hour your employee spent working on your canal. Both are mundane tasks, and both took an hour to do. You both lost an hour you could have spent doing something else, so you're on equal footing. And that 2 hours have yielded a better canal, as well as some currency (which, again, is a stored time which can be invested later). All told you two each spent an hour of work, and produced both an 'hour of canal' and an hour of 'stored time' in the form of obsidian. That 'stored time' might not be able to help you mine stone faster, but you can trade it for diamonds which can be. Or you can hire someone to mine diamonds for you.
With your 'sand pounding' example you suggest that the actors are getting something of value (certificates worth people's time) for nothing (time spend pounding sand). But that time spent pounding sand IS worth something. You could have built a house instead, or harvested crops. Sand pounding might not be a viable 'value creator' in real life, but in the case of minecraft the obsidian acts less like a 'store of time' and more of a 'store of time spent suffering'. If I work on your canal against my will (after a fashion), at least I'm suffering in exchange for something that you suffered to get; we've both got something valuable (a canal, and a certificate good for renting the 'suffering') of others, and we both had to work/suffer for the same amount of time to get it. Same amount of time invested, same amount back.
Diamond also converts time into items, but fails as a fair currency because although good for slightly better tools, the same amount of time invested doesn't always yield similar numbers of diamonds. You might be a better miner than me, but If I start cheating I can really rip you off. Whether you use obsidian or diamond, they each represent an amount of time invested, but with obsidian that amount of time is far more regular, and more resistant to outside influences like luck or cheating.
MCWrapper - Minecraft window manager
HD128 Texture Pack [WIP]- 16x version
HD Art Pack, (Default Paintings Scaled Up)
16x texture pack (out of date)
But isn't the hackability of diamonds nullified with that server (or was it bukkit?) plugin that stops xray from working? I can't remember where I saw it, but it modifies the server to send all underground ores to the client as stone. The server keeps track of what's actually there though, and changes it back as soon as it's exposed to air. So people can xray all they want but they can't see anything until they actually mine it.
Unless I'm thinking of a different problem, doesn't that solve the issue with diamonds as currency?