</p><br />
<p>I was chatting with Jack a while back about how broken an economy gets when it grows rapidly, without reset, and without natural inflation. If we plan to continue without a reset, and have even a hope of feasible trade, we need to take radical action very soon. Trading base units of diamond blocks isn’t that far off of where we are now. So here is my solution as a econ minor, it is kind of like Wolf of Wallstreet, but with less coke, and women, and pretty much everything else. We need to cause massive inflation until we reach normal growth models. 3-5% is normal per year, we should aim for this growth about every six months. Inflation sucks, but is hell better then players standing at spawn giving maxed diamond gear to new players as they join as they can’t store all their diamonds. Trust me, I have seen it happen.</p><br />
<p>Inflation Defined<br /><br />
Inflation is simply a rise in the average price of goods and services in the macroeconomy – Forbes</p><br />
<p>Inflation and Deflation are healthy processes that markets go though, except in rare instances, naturally. This does not happen by magic. It takes someone, somewhere making a conscious choice to charge more for the good or service they sell. l. The initial increase does not have to be in something that is being directly measured by the consumer price index. No person in my town, for example, buys barrels of fish oil; and yet when they become more expensive that sends a ripple throughout all related products. In the end, consumer prices jump as well, and my fish oil gets expensive as shit.</p><br />
<p> What causes inflation? </p><br />
<p>What we should be trying to do is reach a balance where our item prices increase 3-5% about every six months. There is one easy way to do this!</p><br />
<p>Demand Pull is the rise in demand relative to the supply. This one is the easiest to pull off on the microscale we are working at. If half of players halted using diamond for anything other then personal use (tools, armor, beacons) and shifted to trading iron only for two months, only two months, then began releasing their collected diamonds into the market, then returned to normal we would see a large increase in the cost of diamond relative to other goods for just holding their diamonds back for a little bit. It is easy and many of us could and should start reserving at least some of our diamonds from the general population. If a decent portion (>20) of players starting doing this in four month cycles we could observed healthy growth and those players would benefit from the raised prices.</p><br />
<p>Why should you do this?<br /><br />
As the game is made, Diamond should be the most expensive and rare resource. If we continue without a reset Diamond is only going to get more and more common while newly added materials will be much rarer and as such approach quicker and quicker to the price of diamond as time goes on. By halting some of the supply of diamond entering and exiting the market we give other materials a chance to catch up while diamond raises in value slowly.

I was about to comment on this, but in the time that it took me to log in in, Az had already said most of what I was going to say. I think you are over thinking this a little Will. As I have said a few times on the server before, and Az has said in this thread, trading at Ocean Market, to me at least, is a barter system, people offer what they have in exchange for what they need/want. There is no economy per-say, nor is there a creation of a financial system with the need for a defined currency.

I don’t think you need to worry about diamonds being devalued on a scale with how long people have been on the server, for most people diamonds are a consumable resource, not a commodity that people have been sitting on whilst waiting for the day to come when they can realise their assets with the floatation of diamonds inc.

Ocean Market adds another fun little dynamic to the map, it is not the foundation of Minecraft society as we know it. Think of it as a big pair of scales, for example, I have a surplus of iron but I am too lazy to make cake, Kelzor doesn’t have much iron but she is great at making cake. A quick visit to the market and suddenly we both have what we need, without a hint of a sub-prime bubble being created through the leasing of Ocean Market properties. Happy days 🙂

Also, “Like Wolf of Wall Street with less coke and women” !??! Way to sell that one 😛

In all seriousness though, Ocean is great (thanks Jack), no need to over think it. 😉

I like turtles 😀

If I have extra of something that someone else needs, I give it away, and would even if the server reset. I’m not here to have the most chests of stuff, I’m here to build dumb crap.

Is it bad I made this midday and don’t remember making it?

I made a couple of really bad assumptions that make this argument 100% wrong, but the fact that we are pretty much the most awesome Marxist Utopia in Minecraft.

Jack can you delete this or something.