I am on a quest to find a single-best item in the game that can used as a functional currency in its raw form. A functional currency should follow the following criterion below. As these four criterion form an ideal currency, not many items in the game fit all four categories to their fullest but we can get pretty close though.
Ideal Currency
- Uncraftable
- Accessible in survival mode
- Divisible
- Non-renewable
1) Any item that is derived from another item from crafting, repairing, enchanting, brewing, etc. should not be a currency. Example; a potion of leaping or a ladder should not serve as stable currencies as you can derive these items from rabbits feet and logs. After counting this, we can narrow down our list to the following items;
2) The item must be able to be obtained in survival mode. Any item created in creative mode cannot be used to reproduce the currency if there is ever a shortage, this would mean that someone with OP would need to be involved which is not our aim for a player-driven economy.
All the items above except; Bedrock, Dragon Heads, Player Heads, Mob Eggs, Command Block, Silverfish blocks, End Portals
3) Divisible; this one gets tricky. The item that serves as a currency should preferably be divisible just like you can trade a $5 bill for 5, $1 bills or 9 gold nuggets into 1 gold ingot, and should not be too rare that it is too valuable to be used as currency. I have removed any item I deemed too rare to be used as a currency such as nether stars, or dragon eggs. This is necessary as a transaction involving say 5 bread, shouldn't be sold for a nether star as a nether star should say be able to buy 10 stacks of bread instead and defeats the purpose of a currency as it would be worth too much to trade.
4) Finally, the currency should be somewhat non-renewable; the effort required to obtain these resources should be substantial, not too difficult but not too easy either. #3, already eliminated some of the things that'd be seen as too difficult to obtain. Things that are too easy to obtain can be dirt or cobblestone as there is virtually an infinite supply of it with minimal effort. Any plant that is able to be farmed is able to mass produced which would inflate a currency. Certain mobs are able to be mass-produced as well and can be removed from this as well, these mobs are usually mass produced from mob spawners or other methods (rotten flesh, bones, spider eyes, the common stuff, you know xD). Breeding of cattle also produces an unlimited amount of food which would also fail as a currency.
Now, as witches are also able to be mass produced with massive witch farms, redstone, gunpowder, and glowstone can be removed also considering that redstone is fairly common in ore form, gunpowder can be received from creepers and ghasts, and glowstone can be found frequently in the nether. Gunpowder is also not a good currency as it is a recipe for disaster (literally, tnt goes boom).
Villagers, that can trade many things into emerald can also turn emeralds into many different items as well. As a common measure, if emeralds are able to be converted into a specified item, that specified item should not be currency.
Coal, Diamond, Gold, Iron, Slimeball, Ink Sac, Quartz, Nautilus Shell, Any Fish, Ghast Tear, Magma Cream, Rabbit Foot
Finally, as fishing has been known to be abused using hacked client, anything that comes from fishing should also be removed;
Now as some of these materials are obtained via. mob drop still, they can still be used as currency but should be taken into caution as if there is a large enough player base, the sophistication of the players will be great enough to build giant wither skeleton farms or pigmen farm to mass produce these items. For the most solid currency, all we would have left is diamond and quartz as there is no other way to obtain them other than through mining.
Diamond, Quartz
As Diamonds are relatively expensive and there is no such thing as diamond nuggets, I will have to say that nether quartz is the best currency in the game as it is relatively common but not too common and it can not be mass produced like mob drops or crops can.
If you skipped here to the bottom, Quartz through my research is the best currency-item in the game.
A couple of philisophical points: [$ is used as shorthand for currency unit, either considered as a lump of 'bullion' or and abstraction.]
[The item(s) [if any] choosen by any given server as $ seem to me something best left to individual groups; if the system works for the people using it, I call it good.]
An additional property desirable for an ideal currency is that it should have no actual use. [IRL gold largely held this position until the later half of the 19th century; prior to that its only major non-monetary/non-decorative uses were in dentistry (somewhat morbidly, this use was also somewhat recoverable) and as a colorant for red glass.]
The reasoning for this is that if $ can be used to do something 'useful' (eg. some industrial process), any change in the demand for the something will influence the value of $.
The nearest MC blocks I can think of are the stone variants (andesite/diorite/quartz) which are identical, except for appearance, to cobble and stone.
[Note that the crafting tree stone variants { 2Cobble+2Nquartz >> 4Diorite | Diorite +Nquartz >> Granite | Diorite +Cobble >> Andesite } somewhat complicates using any one or more as a currency.]
That a currency be 'Divisible' (in the sense you appear to mean) would not seem to be critical.
Most basic items (eg. food, wood) in MC are fairly easy to obtain in limited quantity; transactions involving these will thus likely be in 'industrial quantities' and adjusting the amount recieved per $ is thus viable. [For those familiar with Hermitcraft, this seems to be the solution found in that player group's use of diamond currency.]
The other end of this spectrum aso needs to be considered. (Hauling shulkers full of $ to market is unlikely to be viable.)
Neither of these remains a strong consideration if the $ in use is considered only (or primarily) a unit of account, rather than one actually used.
(This would essentially involve each player 'running a tab' with each of the others and settling up from time to time.)
Excluding crafted/farmed items may also be overly limiting:
Player labor has an obvious value (different for each player, but clearly non-zero) and the exclusion of this factor seems unnecessary. [Doing so might also be inflamatory of there are any Marxists playing ]
I find it odd that you seem to have dropped clay in step #4, while retaining such things as emeralds, ink sacs, and slimeballs.
Clay is nonrenewable (at least to the same degree that Nquartz is), able to be freely converted from balls to blocks and suffers somewhat less utility usage than does Nquartz. [Nether quartz is an absolute requirement for comparators, observers, etc whereas Bricks Blocks/slabs/stairs are only aesthetically different from stone. Flowerpots do require clay, but usage would likely be limited enough not to greatly impact the currency (cf. the gold example above).]
Following the train of logic in the OP leads to the rather startling proposition that clay (balls and blocks) may form a good basis for a server currency.
[While I find this conclusion odd, propixel's thought experiment was interesting, and I await any other analyses of ths issue…]
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"Why does everything have to be so stoopid?" Harvey Pekar (from American Splendor)
WARNING: I have an extemely "grindy" playstyle; YMMV — if this doesn't seem fun to you, mine what you can from it & bin the rest.
Thanks for the response anyway. Interesting you find clay a good currency item. I primarily removed this as clay is somewhat common in the bottom of oceans and can be found pretty easily. As it is far from the common origins of dirt or stone, clay-looking over your argument could be a useful currency now that I think about it with its limited intrinsic use.
Currency. OK, I understand the need for it. To some extend the emands. But there would be aspect 0: it must NOT be in-game item. Just…hear me out. Anything in game could be ued for something. You want quartz. OK, but I use it for manufacturing "electronics". Clay? It's waluable to me, because I need A LOT of it, to burn, make brics and build southern colony house. There is never enough of it, even though I've hunted it for about a year. I still don't have enough to build building with the proper size. OK, maybe I have the problem I build everything too large, but c'mon. I don't want to run out of storage. By this I'm trying to say, that the first chance I'd get, I'd sold you a lot of items, for clay, and then just…burn it. I believe we all agree that this is a problem.
Currency in MC should be something bit like your exp. It would be some property of yours. In your disk encrypted and secured, of course. Without any ability to decrypt it. You have what you earn. No cheating. If you die, your money don't. Unlike exp. And please, for love of god. No exchangeablity with IRL currencies what so ever. This isn't pay-to-win.
Now, that is the foundation. Let's say we have it. Now there are some problems: who issue this currency? Who is the regulatory organ? How can you earn it and how can you spend it? I just don't know. You might say that Mojang would be the issuer. Eeeeh, really? I'd like them to keep working on the game. I believe we all agree it would be better.
SPend and earn it implies market. How that would work? All MC wolrds having access to some market? Let's say I sell cooked chickens. With my setup, I'm able to flood the marke with them. Price of them would be very low. Let's say someone else would like to sell them, but doesn't have the neccesary infrastructure. His price is higher. Would anyone buy? Well…no. Why would they?
Division of markets, I hear you say. OK, based on what criteria?
Currency in MC is nice idea. Unless you start to think about it and see all of the problems. There would have to be people solving them and players would have to agree on them. That would be painful process. Now, I don't say no to that idea, I just say…let's have MC, where you can build high and big without the game being so laggy, that you can prepare food between frames. The same for large number of animals. Like 2000 of them. Or render distance. Like 24 chunks without problems. I strongly believe that players would rather have this, than currency.
I'd say gold is a great source of currency because it can be divided into nuggets and blocks. However, it can easily be farmed from zombie pigmen. If there were somehow a plugin on your server that prevented these farms, I think that would be best.
Quartz can craft into blocks but cannot craft out.
In addition to the item as a currency thing. Another currency idea I noticed for those who want to stay vanilla is by creating signed books with a single author so they cannot be replicated.
Example Currency:
/give @p minecraft:written_book{display:{Name:"{\"text\":\"$$$ Money $$$\",\"color\":\"dark_green\",\"bold\":\"true\"}"},title:"",author:"Government",pages:["{\"text\":\"This is an official minecraft currency that acts as legal tender for all debts public and private.\",\"color\":\"dark_green\"}"]} 1
I would personally prefer flints to be currency, the tools they make have alternatives or can be found via mobs, and the only way to buy them off villagers is if you have sufficient gravel and an emerald or two anyway. Quartz is far too common and easier to get. Clay might be the best thing overall, but it is also common in swamps and is also of limited supply.
Keep in mind that Minecraft disobeys the laws of conservation, so using non-renewable items, while smart, is risky in the long run if people start burning them. They will never regenerate. Rabbit feet, phantom hide, and nautilus shells seem better because they are uncommon even when farmed excessively, also, mob faming is much harder in 1.13+ as spawning has been changed to limit farming methods (plus the way phantoms hog spawns in the overworld at night)
No item could be used as currency. Items are usually used for something else, and as said, they can be just thrown in lava.
Thinking, what item to use as currency, is like solving problem, which cannot be solved, but prevented.
I say this. Each player would have his account, to which he would have access via the game. Values would not be stored localy, but on some server. That implies the need for internet connection, but you still need that to access any market, which, again, currency implies.
Nobody here is talking about real estate. I build a building in my survival world, and would like to sell it. How to price it? Number of blocks, block types, complexity, size, time spent building… If I sell it, it…what? Dissapears from my world and appears in buyer's world? Could work for some types.
I am on a quest to find a single-best item in the game that can used as a functional currency in its raw form. A functional currency should follow the following criterion below. As these four criterion form an ideal currency, not many items in the game fit all four categories to their fullest but we can get pretty close though.
Ideal Currency
- Uncraftable
- Accessible in survival mode
- Divisible
- Non-renewable
1) Any item that is derived from another item from crafting, repairing, enchanting, brewing, etc. should not be a currency. Example; a potion of leaping or a ladder should not serve as stable currencies as you can derive these items from rabbits feet and logs. After counting this, we can narrow down our list to the following items;
Granite, Diorite, Andesite, Grass Block, Dirt, Coarse Dirt, Podzol, Cobblestone, Bedrock, Sand, Red Sand, Gravel, Any Logs, Sponge, Wool, Obsidian, Ice, Pumpkin, Netherrack, Soul Sand, Mycelium, Endstone, Terracotta, Packed Ice, Coral Blocks, Any Plant/Sapling, Any Leaves, Cobweb, Sea Pickles, Cactus, Silverfish blocks, Vines, Lilypads, End Portal Frame, Mob Skulls, Redstone, Saddle, Elytra, Horse Armor, Turtle Egg, Scute, Coal, Diamond, Gold, Iron, String, Feather, Gunpowder, Any Seeds, Wheat, Flint, Snowball, Leather, Clayball, Sugarcane, Kelp, Slimeball, Egg, Glowstone dust, Ink Sac, Cocoa Bean, Lapis, Bones, Pumpkin Seeds, Melon Seeds, Ender Pearls, Blaze Rods, Netherwart, Any Mob Egg, EXP Bottle, Emerald, Nether Star, Empty Map, Quartz, Prismarine Shards, Prismarine Crystals, Rabbit Hide, Chorus Fruit, Shulker Shell, Beetroot Seeds, Nautilus Shell, Heart of the Sea, Apple, Pork, Beef, Notch Apples, Any Fish, Melon, Chicken, Rotten Flesh, Spider Eye, Carrot, Potato, Poison Potato, Rabbit, Mutton, Beetroot, Name Tag, Totem of Undying, Trident, Ghast Tear, Magma Cream, Rabbit Foot, Phantom Membrane, Command Block
2) The item must be able to be obtained in survival mode. Any item created in creative mode cannot be used to reproduce the currency if there is ever a shortage, this would mean that someone with OP would need to be involved which is not our aim for a player-driven economy.
All the items above except; Bedrock, Dragon Heads, Player Heads, Mob Eggs, Command Block, Silverfish blocks, End Portals
3) Divisible; this one gets tricky. The item that serves as a currency should preferably be divisible just like you can trade a $5 bill for 5, $1 bills or 9 gold nuggets into 1 gold ingot, and should not be too rare that it is too valuable to be used as currency. I have removed any item I deemed too rare to be used as a currency such as nether stars, or dragon eggs. This is necessary as a transaction involving say 5 bread, shouldn't be sold for a nether star as a nether star should say be able to buy 10 stacks of bread instead and defeats the purpose of a currency as it would be worth too much to trade.
Granite, Diorite, Andesite, Grass Block, Dirt, Coarse Dirt, Podzol, Cobblestone, Sand, Red Sand, Gravel, Any Logs, Wool, Obsidian, Ice, Pumpkin, Netherrack, Soul Sand, Mycelium, Endstone, Terracotta, Packed Ice, Coral Blocks, Any Plant/Sapling, Any Leaves, Cobweb, Sea Pickles, Cactus, Vines, Lilypads, Redstone, Turtle Egg, Scute, Coal, Diamond, Gold, Iron, String, Feather, Gunpowder, Any Seeds, Wheat, Flint, Snowball, Leather, Clayball, Sugarcane, Kelp, Slimeball, Egg, Glowstone dust, Ink Sac, Cocoa Bean, Lapis, Bones, Pumpkin Seeds, Melon Seeds, Ender Pearls, Blaze Rods, Netherwart, Emerald, Nether Star, Quartz, Prismarine Shards, Prismarine Crystals, Rabbit Hide, Chorus Fruit, Beetroot Seeds, Nautilus Shell, Apple, Pork, Beef, Any Fish, Melon, Chicken, Rotten Flesh, Spider Eye, Carrot, Potato, Poison Potato, Rabbit, Mutton, Beetroot, Ghast Tear, Magma Cream, Rabbit Foot, Phantom Membrane
4) Finally, the currency should be somewhat non-renewable; the effort required to obtain these resources should be substantial, not too difficult but not too easy either. #3, already eliminated some of the things that'd be seen as too difficult to obtain. Things that are too easy to obtain can be dirt or cobblestone as there is virtually an infinite supply of it with minimal effort. Any plant that is able to be farmed is able to mass produced which would inflate a currency. Certain mobs are able to be mass-produced as well and can be removed from this as well, these mobs are usually mass produced from mob spawners or other methods (rotten flesh, bones, spider eyes, the common stuff, you know xD). Breeding of cattle also produces an unlimited amount of food which would also fail as a currency.
Redstone, Coal, Diamond, Gold, Iron, Gunpowder, Flint, Slimeball, Glowstone dust, Ink Sac, Lapis, Ender Pearls, Emerald, Quartz, Nautilus Shell, Apple, Any Fish, Ghast Tear, Magma Cream, Rabbit Foot
Now, as witches are also able to be mass produced with massive witch farms, redstone, gunpowder, and glowstone can be removed also considering that redstone is fairly common in ore form, gunpowder can be received from creepers and ghasts, and glowstone can be found frequently in the nether. Gunpowder is also not a good currency as it is a recipe for disaster (literally, tnt goes boom).
Coal, Diamond, Gold, Iron, Flint, Slimeball, Ink Sac, Lapis, Ender Pearls, Emerald, Quartz, Nautilus Shell, Apple, Any Fish, Ghast Tear, Magma Cream, Rabbit Foot
Villagers, that can trade many things into emerald can also turn emeralds into many different items as well. As a common measure, if emeralds are able to be converted into a specified item, that specified item should not be currency.
Coal, Diamond, Gold, Iron, Slimeball, Ink Sac, Quartz, Nautilus Shell, Any Fish, Ghast Tear, Magma Cream, Rabbit Foot
Finally, as fishing has been known to be abused using hacked client, anything that comes from fishing should also be removed;
Coal, Diamond, Gold, Iron, Slimeball, Quartz, Ghast Tear, Magma Cream, Rabbit Foot
Now as some of these materials are obtained via. mob drop still, they can still be used as currency but should be taken into caution as if there is a large enough player base, the sophistication of the players will be great enough to build giant wither skeleton farms or pigmen farm to mass produce these items. For the most solid currency, all we would have left is diamond and quartz as there is no other way to obtain them other than through mining.
Diamond, Quartz
As Diamonds are relatively expensive and there is no such thing as diamond nuggets, I will have to say that nether quartz is the best currency in the game as it is relatively common but not too common and it can not be mass produced like mob drops or crops can.
If you skipped here to the bottom, Quartz through my research is the best currency-item in the game.
So let me and everyone else know what you think! What do you think would be the best currency if you had to pick an item.
A couple of philisophical points: [$ is used as shorthand for currency unit, either considered as a lump of 'bullion' or and abstraction.]
[The item(s) [if any] choosen by any given server as $ seem to me something best left to individual groups; if the system works for the people using it, I call it good.]
An additional property desirable for an ideal currency is that it should have no actual use. [IRL gold largely held this position until the later half of the 19th century; prior to that its only major non-monetary/non-decorative uses were in dentistry (somewhat morbidly, this use was also somewhat recoverable) and as a colorant for red glass.]
The reasoning for this is that if $ can be used to do something 'useful' (eg. some industrial process), any change in the demand for the something will influence the value of $.
The nearest MC blocks I can think of are the stone variants (andesite/diorite/quartz) which are identical, except for appearance, to cobble and stone.
[Note that the crafting tree stone variants { 2Cobble+2Nquartz >> 4Diorite | Diorite +Nquartz >> Granite | Diorite +Cobble >> Andesite } somewhat complicates using any one or more as a currency.]
That a currency be 'Divisible' (in the sense you appear to mean) would not seem to be critical.
Most basic items (eg. food, wood) in MC are fairly easy to obtain in limited quantity; transactions involving these will thus likely be in 'industrial quantities' and adjusting the amount recieved per $ is thus viable. [For those familiar with Hermitcraft, this seems to be the solution found in that player group's use of diamond currency.]
The other end of this spectrum aso needs to be considered. (Hauling shulkers full of $ to market is unlikely to be viable.)
Neither of these remains a strong consideration if the $ in use is considered only (or primarily) a unit of account, rather than one actually used.
(This would essentially involve each player 'running a tab' with each of the others and settling up from time to time.)
Excluding crafted/farmed items may also be overly limiting:
Player labor has an obvious value (different for each player, but clearly non-zero) and the exclusion of this factor seems unnecessary. [Doing so might also be inflamatory of there are any Marxists playing ]
I find it odd that you seem to have dropped clay in step #4, while retaining such things as emeralds, ink sacs, and slimeballs.
Clay is nonrenewable (at least to the same degree that Nquartz is), able to be freely converted from balls to blocks and suffers somewhat less utility usage than does Nquartz. [Nether quartz is an absolute requirement for comparators, observers, etc whereas Bricks Blocks/slabs/stairs are only aesthetically different from stone. Flowerpots do require clay, but usage would likely be limited enough not to greatly impact the currency (cf. the gold example above).]
Following the train of logic in the OP leads to the rather startling proposition that clay (balls and blocks) may form a good basis for a server currency.
[While I find this conclusion odd, propixel's thought experiment was interesting, and I await any other analyses of ths issue…]
Thanks for the response anyway. Interesting you find clay a good currency item. I primarily removed this as clay is somewhat common in the bottom of oceans and can be found pretty easily. As it is far from the common origins of dirt or stone, clay-looking over your argument could be a useful currency now that I think about it with its limited intrinsic use.
Nice topic. I will shamelessly plug my simillar thread here: https://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/minecraft-java-edition/survival-mode/2930625-assessing-the-economic-strength-of-your-world-your
Currency. OK, I understand the need for it. To some extend the emands. But there would be aspect 0: it must NOT be in-game item. Just…hear me out. Anything in game could be ued for something. You want quartz. OK, but I use it for manufacturing "electronics". Clay? It's waluable to me, because I need A LOT of it, to burn, make brics and build southern colony house. There is never enough of it, even though I've hunted it for about a year. I still don't have enough to build building with the proper size. OK, maybe I have the problem I build everything too large, but c'mon. I don't want to run out of storage. By this I'm trying to say, that the first chance I'd get, I'd sold you a lot of items, for clay, and then just…burn it. I believe we all agree that this is a problem.
Currency in MC should be something bit like your exp. It would be some property of yours. In your disk encrypted and secured, of course. Without any ability to decrypt it. You have what you earn. No cheating. If you die, your money don't. Unlike exp. And please, for love of god. No exchangeablity with IRL currencies what so ever. This isn't pay-to-win.
Now, that is the foundation. Let's say we have it. Now there are some problems: who issue this currency? Who is the regulatory organ? How can you earn it and how can you spend it? I just don't know. You might say that Mojang would be the issuer. Eeeeh, really? I'd like them to keep working on the game. I believe we all agree it would be better.
SPend and earn it implies market. How that would work? All MC wolrds having access to some market? Let's say I sell cooked chickens. With my setup, I'm able to flood the marke with them. Price of them would be very low. Let's say someone else would like to sell them, but doesn't have the neccesary infrastructure. His price is higher. Would anyone buy? Well…no. Why would they?
Division of markets, I hear you say. OK, based on what criteria?
Currency in MC is nice idea. Unless you start to think about it and see all of the problems. There would have to be people solving them and players would have to agree on them. That would be painful process. Now, I don't say no to that idea, I just say…let's have MC, where you can build high and big without the game being so laggy, that you can prepare food between frames. The same for large number of animals. Like 2000 of them. Or render distance. Like 24 chunks without problems. I strongly believe that players would rather have this, than currency.
I'd say gold is a great source of currency because it can be divided into nuggets and blocks. However, it can easily be farmed from zombie pigmen. If there were somehow a plugin on your server that prevented these farms, I think that would be best.
Quartz can craft into blocks but cannot craft out.
In addition to the item as a currency thing. Another currency idea I noticed for those who want to stay vanilla is by creating signed books with a single author so they cannot be replicated.
Example Currency:
/give @p minecraft:written_book{display:{Name:"{\"text\":\"$$$ Money $$$\",\"color\":\"dark_green\",\"bold\":\"true\"}"},title:"",author:"Government",pages:["{\"text\":\"This is an official minecraft currency that acts as legal tender for all debts public and private.\",\"color\":\"dark_green\"}"]} 1
I would personally prefer flints to be currency, the tools they make have alternatives or can be found via mobs, and the only way to buy them off villagers is if you have sufficient gravel and an emerald or two anyway. Quartz is far too common and easier to get. Clay might be the best thing overall, but it is also common in swamps and is also of limited supply.
Keep in mind that Minecraft disobeys the laws of conservation, so using non-renewable items, while smart, is risky in the long run if people start burning them. They will never regenerate. Rabbit feet, phantom hide, and nautilus shells seem better because they are uncommon even when farmed excessively, also, mob faming is much harder in 1.13+ as spawning has been changed to limit farming methods (plus the way phantoms hog spawns in the overworld at night)
No item could be used as currency. Items are usually used for something else, and as said, they can be just thrown in lava.
Thinking, what item to use as currency, is like solving problem, which cannot be solved, but prevented.
I say this. Each player would have his account, to which he would have access via the game. Values would not be stored localy, but on some server. That implies the need for internet connection, but you still need that to access any market, which, again, currency implies.
Nobody here is talking about real estate. I build a building in my survival world, and would like to sell it. How to price it? Number of blocks, block types, complexity, size, time spent building… If I sell it, it…what? Dissapears from my world and appears in buyer's world? Could work for some types.