On Wed, 28 Apr 2004 18:19:44 -0700 (PDT), rone <rone at ennui.org> wrote: > Sunny Han writes: > The dragearean system can't be fiat tho, isn't it actually backed by > gold? A fiat system can be backed by gold if each unit of account is backed by less than a unit of account's worth of gold. If each paper dollar is redeemable for twenty cents' worth of gold, there's eighty fiat cents in the dollar. A fifty-Imperial piece does not, and cannot, mass fifty times what the one-Imperial piece does -- therefore, a fifty-imperial coin has some amount of fiat Imperials in it of necessity. It's worth fifty Imperials because the Empire says it is, not because the metal in the coin says so. > It's backed by the Orb... but where do you hock the Orb if you're short? That's pretty much what _Orca_ is all about. pe