- Tibor: How’s the exchange rate?
- Colleague: Lousy! Looks like the rich farts got off scot-free this year.
- Tibor: Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose.
- Colleague: Yes, but I need to renovate my kitchen. A few extra Shards would have helped a lot.
- Luitpold: Any buyers left?! I have 730 red ones!
- Tibor and Colleague: Jackpot!
- Sign: Maximum Amount: 56 expired Shards
- Clerk: Here are your 56 Shards.
- Tibor: I have exactly 56 expired Shards.
- Clerk: How could it be any different.
A Sky Full of Stars 050
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31 thoughts on “A Sky Full of Stars 050”
HKMaly
Of course there is gray market. Everyone knows it but the politicians still come up with ideas which would only work without it.
7arty
So… I’m guessing each red/expired shard gets exchanged into a normal shard, so those wealthy enough to end up with more than 56 shards at the end of the year would have something to lose?
And that’s what the exchange rate here is, normal shards vs red shards (say 1:10 or 1:2 or whatever rate they can negotiate here), since it’ll still better than nothing for Mr. 730 red shards here?
Manabi
Sounds like it and it’s a clever way to transfer wealth. The rich will have lots of red shards beyond the limit while the poor have very few shards. So the rich can sell their red shards at a heavy discount to poor people to recover some of their losses, who then turn them in and get a full shard in return. Basically the poor are buying dollars for pennies.
I have no idea how it’d work in real life, but it’s definitely interesting.
Crystalgate
How it would work in real life is that the rich would find another resource to invest in before new year and bypass the perishable coins.
DysprosiumDy
Which would in turn cause the price of these other resources to go up due to the increased demand. So it might be pretty tricky to properly circumvent this devaluation of currency. Though you are right: the rich will always find a way.
Somdudewillson
Functionally, it’s basically just a progressive tax that gives rebates for low-income earners, with a per-person cap.
Vicious Sand
56 shards are only 8 full coins, since Novil wants to torture us with base eight math.
730 divided by 8 equals 91.25. That means 730 shards means 91.25 full coins. That means Mr 730 needs to pay 13.03 people to each turn in 56 shards. Mr 730 must be under the same restrictions of the 56 shard limit. There’s no information on what each person gets as profit for doing so, as we aren’t told if people are buying red shards from Mr 730, or if they’re exchanging the shards and returning them to Mr 730 and then get paid something.
Either way, I wonder what the mechanics are for creating fake red shards. Glass would be too heavy I assume. I don’t know the use of splitting up all your coins to create- or avoid- the maximum amount of them getting red sharded to have something to trade in for undamaged shards. But I can clearly say that people have tried things dumber than that as a get rich quick scheme.
Vicious Sand
56 divided by 8 equals 7. Which means 7 coins. Which is 7 coins per trip. So I got something wrong, which is strange, since I’m using a calculator for accuracy, so I’m looking the results right on the screen and could not have made a typo pressing 8 at that time. It would have been noticed at the time. So 8×7=56 which means people are getting 7 coins per trip to the money exchange window.
thysi
730 in base 8 equals 472 in our usual base 10 math. 472/8 = 59 so it’s 59 full coins.
And the limit for exchanging is 46-base-10 (5×8+6) or 5 coins plus 6 shards.
Mersharr
We can assume the numbers used are still in base 10, it’s just that 8 shards make one coin… and I have no idea what the rest of this even means.
MacareuxMoine
While your math is technically correct, the dates given on the previous page (e.g. ’30 Deepcold 5382, 23:59:59′) prove that these people use base 10 numbers. Same goes for the derivative Scarlet solved, which requires base 10 to be correct.
MacareuxMoine
Also currency subdivisions are no prove for the use of a specific numeral system:
While probably all current currencies use base-10 subdivisions, non-base-10 subdivisions were quite common throughout most of human history.
Arthur
Mr. 730 got a rate of 3:1 from Tibor which I guess isn’t so bad. He should have stockpiled non-liquid assets before the exchange happened, of course, but I guess he might have not been able to find buyers so close to the new year.
Vicious Sand
Non-liquid assets, eh? I wrote this earlier, trying to figure out the angle on what was going on. If this is a known thing, then money is worth less than the good that you buy with the money. An apple is still an apple, and a hat is still a hat, but the coin will be less of a coin.- A self-reducing system encourages this. Inflated costs cost more because constantly better products are being created while the amount of people are increasing, but money deleting itself is a different thing.
It’s better to have fewer monetary units then, so it’s best to spend as soon as it’s gotten. Perhaps there’s a land-purchase scheme somewhere. Like everybody getting together and buying a plot of the village every December before the new years decrease. At the end of it, contribution scores are compared and houses are assigned ownership.
MacareuxMoine
While Tibor could afford a 3:1 rate (18 of his 19 golden to get 54 red ), I guess Mr. 730 was desperate enough to accept a considerably higher one (like 6:1 or 9:1).
DysprosiumDy
Which would in turn cause the price of these other resources to go up due to the increased demand. So it might be pretty tricky to properly circumvent this devaluation of currency. Though you are right: the rich will always find a way.
DysprosiumDy
This got posted in the wrong place. Apologies.
Vicious Sand
This is all very interesting, in that I don’t know what’s going on. It’s clearly a currency exchange market, though only Novil has the important data. The 4th panel seems to be exchanging 1 red for 1 normal shard. If there’s an exchange rate for red shards, seemingly set by a central authority, why would it least effect the ones who have the most money/red shards? (implied in the first panel) It’s still an effect of going down, right? The counter girl in the last panel doesn’t seem to think much of Tibor. Is she acting like he’s trying to abuse the system? Even though he’s got exact change! It’s orderly, not abusing the system. If anything, the red shard trade favours the poor for having the red shards to be part of the system. (as in Tibor and Guy being pleased in the third panel) What about the two red shards that Tibor got in the previous page? Is that part of the amount he’s trading in? I assume there’s a central register being kept, Because Government, so that Tibor can’t keep visiting different teller windows. And what do red shards do anyway? With the coins creating new shards eventually, therefor coins creating coins, what does a bunch red ones do? Can they be ‘condensed’ into normal shards, or empty shards, or are they dissipated to stop coins from creating giant amounts of empty coins yearly?
Kazuma Taichi
I get the sense that this has been a regular thing of many people in the line having exactly 56, likely because of the washington lookin’ fella
we do see the lady in front of Tibor also getting 56 for instance
Vicious Sand
Yeah, but she’s looking at Tibor like one would a shoe needing cleaning.
Manabi
I think the comment in the first panel was referring to the fact that no rich people were selling off red shards until the guy showed up in panel 3. Probably the assumption was that the rich planned ahead and didn’t end up with many red shards, so no chance for poor/poorer folks to get some red shards cheap to trade in for regular shards.
As for why the woman is acting that way, it’s not Tibor specifically, just that it’s likely most people are showing up with exactly 56 red shards, the maximum amount, to trade in. After a while it’d make a person feel exactly how she responds, “How could it be any different.”
I also don’t think the coins create new shards, they only deprecate some amount of shards (appears to be random, since one coin of full shards had none turn red) when the new year rolls around.
MacareuxMoine
I assume, that each year all shards minted prior to an specific date will expire (this could be either predetermined (like all shards older than X years will expire) or set individually each time. We have seen, that you can split up a full coin into partly filled coins. Based on this I assume that you can merge partly filled coins into full coins again, and neither empty coins nor loose shards can exist. Thus the shards of a coin, that never was split up, will all expire at the same time, while any pattern of expired shards can occur in re-merged coins.
The 1:1 exchange rate at the offical counter is limited to 56 shards(= 7 coins) per person. So anyone who has more than 56 expired shards can only try to sell them to those, that haven’t reached the limit yet. The comment in panel 1 indicates, that there were probaly only few people with small amounts of surplus expired shards to sell and enough people who would accept low rates (like 4:3 or worse) to buy them.
Rick Smith
The rich guy is in a hurry to unload his expired shards. Presumably he will have to sell them for below what they are worth, in order to move them quickly. I think that they are exchanging expired shards for new ones at a 1:1 ratio based on what was said to the woman before Tibor in the line.
This is obviously magical money. I think that the idea was to prevent the wealthy from accumulating massive amounts of wealth. When the wealthy to sell expired shards at (say) a 12.5% discount to poor people, it breaks the system, which is why the teller is miffed. However, it still helps the poor, since they are getting a discount to help the rich guys move the coins quickly.
Let us say you are wealthy and a massive asshole. Many poor people might not deal with you, or demand a 50% discount. So the rest of the year, you don’t want to be too mean to the poor.
I really like this, it is such an original idea!
Warm Regards, Rick.
aaaaaa123456789
It’s funny how different this is from how it would work in the real world.
Don’t get me wrong, this is a comic and I’m not expecting a deep economic analysis of the implications of expiring currency, but how it would actually work is just… extremely different.
For what we saw in the last page, two out of every eight pieces just expire. This is essentially equivalent to 33% annual inflation. And that is something I’m very familiar with, for the simple reason that I live in a place (Argentina) where that’s pretty much the norm.
And what happens in practice is that people simply don’t save money in an inflating currnecy. People of course use the currency, because that’s what you’d spend locally, pay taxes on, and so on, but they don’t keep their long-term savings in it. Nobody wants to lose that much money over time, of course, and there’s always other alternatives.
In our world, the other alternatives are simply better currencies. No matter how much governments attempt to regulate currency exchanges, there are always black markets that let you dispossess yourself of the bad currency right away, ensuring you never accumulate large savings in it. As a result, the true value of the local currency becomes what these black markets dictate, and everything is priced around that value. The government-dictated value of the currency is a fantasy and the entire market quickly acknowledges that.
In a world like this one, where there only seems to be one currency, the equivalent would happen with some currency-like good. Civilizations in our world all the way up to medieval times chose rare metals as currency because they easily satisfied all the necessary properties (non-perishable, divisible, rare…), but they’re not the only materials with those properties; if choice #1 hadn’t been available, choices #2, #3, and so on would have been. The same would be true here in the comic’s world. Some kind of rare and non-perishable raw material would exist, and that kind of good would quickly become a tradable asset behaving like a currency until the markets settled on one or a few options.
In fact, it’s safe to say that this has already happened. The man trying to get rid of his extra expired shards only has 730 of them. We don’t know the actual purchasing power of the shards, but it’s safe to say that 730 of the smallest unit of currency in a civilization has never been any significant wealth. It’s probably a few months’ worth of minimum wages at most. Nobody’s buying a house with that, for sure.
That means that the people who actually have big money, the ones who would’ve had maybe 10,000 of them, simply don’t. They have their savings in something else. They’re not keeping huge amounts of money in an inflating currency.
And maybe that’s why they’re saying that the rich got off scot-free again. They’re not affected by the mandatory inflation that everyone else is.
Mersharr
Thank you for the inisight
Crystalgate
It was 2 out of 21 pieces, two full coins and one with only 5 shards left and two of the coins lost one shard. So it’s about 10% lost.
The rest of what you’re saying is not wrong, but the fact that people here can exchange red shards for proper yellow ones is probably an effort to alleviate the problem you outlined. From what I can tell, you can exchange red shards for yellow shards on a 1 on 1 ratio (the lady before Tibor got 56 shards and she could at most have given 56), but no more than 56. I don’t know what the exchange rate that Tibor mentioned is about though.
Also, via a comment from Novil, we know that in A Sky Full of Stars 043, they were producing shards. So, shards are being produced and every new year, a percent of them perish. If the perish rate is 10%, there cannot exist more than ten times the number of shards than is being produced every year. What we have is a setting where the currency cannot inflate.
Now, assuming I’m right, you with about a 10% perish rate and 56 shards max, you need 560 shards to expect to lose that amount, but you probably want to be safe, so you can keep about 500 shards without having to worry too much. So, as Tibor said, poor people don’t have to worry. Renting two horses and a wagon cost 7 shards, which to me sounds like 500 would be more than enough for middle class people generally, but they will have a problem if they want to save up for a house. This leaves rich people and I guess middle class people who do need to save up for something big who indeed would do as you say they do.
FuryoftheStars
“I don’t know what the exchange rate that Tibor mentioned is about though.”
My guess on this is he’s talking about the rate in which those with red shards are willing to exchange for regular shards. It’s “lousy” because “the rich farts got off scot-free”, making the supply low, and thus the prices (“exchange rate”) high.
Arthur
That’s quite a bit of snow in a place where people have never seen a lake larger than what they could not see the other side of. I suppose the ice at the caps could sublimate instead of evaporating although I’m not sure about the physics of that.
Crystalgate
As per the settings page, there is not much snow. It does snow here, but there’s very little on the floor or other surfaces where it could accumulate, so the snow has not been going on for a long time. There does exist enough water for boats to exist, so a little snow, but no more than that, sounds about right.
DysprosiumDy
I really appreciate the amount of world building you’re doing, Novil. It’s excellent work. I do think it’s a bit rapid and would feel better if spaced out over more pages, so that the information comes more naturally and the reader has more time to wonder about things. But I fully realize that cranking out pages is a costly and time consuming process, so there’s also a need to keep things moving along.
I look forward to seeing more details about this world you’ve created. It’s inspiring. 🙂
NilsO
Tibor had 21 shards, 2 of them turned red. That is a 9.5% failure rate. One observed event makes bad statistics, but I guess the mean failure rate is around 10%. So if you have more than 560 shards, you can expect to get more than 56 red shards, more than the central bank is willing to compensate. This has some major consequences:
* It is a bad idea to accumulate wealth in shards, you should invest in other assets.
* It creates a grey market, where rich people try to sell surplus red shards at a discount.
* Poor people can suddenly get some money, provided they have a few shards saved before this event.
Mr. 730 obviously is quite wealthy, but a bad investor. Assuming most people in the town square were wealthy, and had at least 56 red shards themselves, then Tibor and his friend could negotiate a heavy discount. Tibor needed 54 red shards (he already had 2), perhaps he just paid a few shards for the red ones? Anyway, Tibor now has at least 56 shards, and is not dirt poor anymore.
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