The currency market

Where one money is exchanged for another, and the one road from a country's treasury to a person's purse. Under Marketplace → Currency.

What is traded

Six currencies: gold, and the five a country mints (doge, enmus, gez, hebrea and geadh). Any one trades against any other, and gold is a currency like the rest here rather than a price everything is quoted in. An offer names what it gives, how much of it is left, what it wants in return, and the price.

There is no tax on this market and no licence for it. What gates you is only where you stand.

The same rules as the goods market

A price is a lot: so many of one currency for so many of another, in its smallest whole terms, and a trade is a whole number of lots. Everything the goods market says about lots is true here, because it is the same rule.

• What you offer leaves you when the offer stands. It is held by the offer, not by your purse, until somebody buys it or you take the offer off, and what has not sold comes back when you do.
• You post where you stand, and a buyer must be standing in that country to take it. Anyone may read any country's book from anywhere.
• You may take part of an offer, as many lots as you like up to what is left, and the rest stands at the same price.
• You may pull your offer from anywhere. Nobody else can.
• You cannot take your own offer.
• An offer is property. It passes to your next character with the rest of your estate and stays on the book meanwhile, like everything else you own.
• The book is ordered cheapest first, in terms of what you would pay.

A country's offer

A council puts its own currency, or its gold, on this market by law, and takes the offer down the same way; see the council. Its offer sits in the same book as anybody's, is marked as the country's, and is taken the same way. This is the only way a treasury ever pays a person, and it is how anybody first holds a country's currency. See the money.

Every country opens with an offer already standing. When the world begins, each country has 50,000 of its own currency on its book for gold, at one gold to a hundred. Stand in the country, pay a gold and you hold a hundred of its money, which is enough to buy food there before anyone has hired you. Every currency starts at the same price, and where it goes from there is up to each council.

That opening offer is the country's like any other. Its council can replace it with a new price or take it down by law. Once it has all been bought it is gone, and only the council can put another up. Nothing stops one player buying the lot and selling it on at a markup; that is what the council's laws are for.

What this market does not do

• Nothing sets a rate but a seller. There is no bank, no fixed exchange and no rate that follows anything. The opening offers are sellers too: once gez's is bought out or withdrawn, and if nobody else offers gez for gold, gez cannot be bought.
• Nothing matches two offers. An offer waits for a person to take it, even when another offer on the book would happily trade with it.
• Nothing here is minted or burned. Every trade moves what already exists from one party to the other; what a council creates, it creates under its own law and not here.