On Wed, 28 Apr 2004, Paul Echeverri wrote: > 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. What if the largest denomination weighs a gram, and is pure gold, while the smallest weighs a gram, and is 1% gold?