Rose Quartz Currency?

[Deleted member 4265]

I didn't want to use any type of metal coins as the currency of the country where my story takes place (although they do value gold, they consider it to be expensive and beautiful but not necessarily as money) so I came up with using rose quartz and other semiprecious gems as currency, but I realize that caving and polishing gemstones (especially if I want to have the royal seal carved into them or something) are more time consuming to produce than coins so I wonder if this would be too impractical as a currency system.

 

[CupofJoe]

If it's not used for its intrinsic value [gold, silver etc.] then a currency needs to be cheap to make, resilient and hard to forge. I guess that Quartz could be very bad to forge but I'm not sure about its resilience. If you drop it and it shatters are the bits worth anything?
And I can't see it being cheap to make as you say...
It might make a "banking currency" that wasn't in general circulation but had very high worth...
On the other hand...
Just about anything is worth what people are willing to believe its worth.

 

[Jerseydevil]

The reason metal coins were used was because they were easy to divide. The coin itself was not valuable for being a coin, but because it was a set weight of a specific metal. The coin could then be divided and used to pay for smaller amounts of a commodity. It was the metal itself that was worth something, not the face printed on it.

The biggest issue I see with the quartz currency is that sub dividing it will be difficult. I could work, it depends on how much emphasis you place on the currency of your world. If it is only mentioned in passing, it'll work. If your work has a major economic theme to it, this may be a bit more difficult to pull off effectively. Just my thoughts.

 

[Heliotrope]

Yeah, coins have ridges on them to stop people from shaving them down, which was common before the 18th c. They could shave off slivers of silver or copper or whatever and melt them down and make new coins or use the metal. Like JD noted, it was the metal that was valuable. But again, like the other poster noted, if they believe quarts to be valuable for whatever reason then it would work...

 

[Caged Maiden]

If the money doesn't have an inherent value, but instead stands for a certain other commodity, like our paper money does, you could consider the quartz as a sort of similar tool. Maybe it only comes from the capital city? Then, anyone carrying one of the quartz coins has tradable commodities in the capital city?

 

[skip.knox]

Jerseydevil makes the key point: metal coins were not valuable because of any intrinsic value so much as metal is the best stuff for consistent weight and being easily divided. Stones cannot be divided in any consistent manner, so there's really no way to have consistency of value.

That said, this is fantasy (how many times have we made this point?). There's nothing at all to prevent you from inventing a gemstone-like substance that has the malleability of metal but the visual properties of a gemstone. You get to make up a name and everything for it. I'd buy it. *ahem*

 

[Deleted member 4265]

If it's not used for its intrinsic value [gold, silver etc.] then a currency needs to be cheap to make, resilient and hard to forge. I guess that Quartz could be very bad to forge but I'm not sure about its resilience. If you drop it and it shatters are the bits worth anything?
And I can't see it being cheap to make as you say...
It might make a "banking currency" that wasn't in general circulation but had very high worth...
On the other hand...
Just about anything is worth what people are willing to believe its worth.

My idea was to have it be a representative form of currency which stood for some (as yet undetermined) amount of salt. I came up with the idea of using rose quartz because its both fairly common, rates high on the harness scale, and hard to forge, however I didn't think about the cost of actually producing the currency which seems to me now to be too high.

I think my best option is to keep with the gold standard after all, but for most people to use some sort of tally stick system.