Welcome to the next in an ongoing series of writing prompts in the Worldbuilding community !
I'm aiming to post one of these each Sunday. They aren't a replacement for the excellent daily prompts from 
Image generated by AI in Wombo.art
The prompt this week is - Debased Currency
It's thought that money as we know it was invented in Lydia sometime around the 7th Century BC. Prior to that, barter was the order of the day between individuals and when paying taxes, although when it came to international commerce there were a few accepted high value products (primarily ingots of copper, tin and bronze) that held a consistent value.
But as soon as money was invented, people found ways to forge it or reduce it's value. Clippers nipped little bits of gold or silver off the edges of coins, which is why milling was invented as soon as the technology caught up. People made lead or pewter versions of silver coins and brass copies of gold ones.
That was bad enough, but then governments started doing it. The Romans were the worst for it. Each time there was an economic crisis or a need to pay huge bonuses to the legions to buy loyalty to a questionable new emperor, the percentage of silver in "silver" coins was reduced. The weight was often reduced, and new coins with strange names were bought in to confuse people's perception of value. The denarius in 211 BC was originally around 95% pure and weighed 4.5 grams; by the second century AD it was 50% pure and weighed 3.4 grams. By the third century, the silver content was often under 2%. Despite attempts at rigid price controls, this debasement fuelled inflation and a general loss of confidence in the state as a whole.
In modern times, governments find it even easier to debase the currency. They don't have to make a less valuable coin, they just print money out of thin air through quantitative easing, issuing bonds and similar shenanigans. The value of a nation's currency is no longer backed by gold, it's just backed by the hope that the economy will keep delivering enough tax revenue to pay the interest on the bonds.
Tell me a story of debased currency from your setting ! What kind of conversations go on behind closed doors between rulers and treasury ministers ? What mechanism is used to debase the currency ? What are the impacts on the economy, on inflation, and on foreign and domestic trade ? What is the reaction of ordinary people - how do they see their government, and how do they find ways to survive the economic and cost-of-living impacts ?
Just to add a bit of spice to things, the two entries I most like (and are linked in comments to this post, so I can find them !) that are posted by midnight (GMT) next Saturday will each get a prize of one Hive SBI.
This link will take you to the FAQ where you can read more about Hive SBI - it's a project I thoroughly support because it gives both the donor and winner a steady trickle of passive income paid out in the form of upvotes on posts.
Guidelines
I stole these guidelines straight from
- Prompt replies may be anything! Art, game assets, stories, worldbuilding details, fake wiki entries, maps... whatever you want to create!
- Please ensure you reply to this post with a link to your reply
- Posting in or cross-posting to the Worldbuilding community is highly encouraged
- Use the hashtag #worldbuilding
- Prompt replies can be any length.
- AI images to illustrate your posts are fine, as long as they are credited to whichever software you used to make them
- Posts using AI to create the text are not acceptable; these prompts (and community) are a way to expand and have fun with human imagination, and I firmly believe AI will never be able to replicate the human spark.
Some other neat communities for writing that you might want to check out are:
It can be a lot of fun to mix and match our prompts with some of these other community prompts.
People who have asked to be tagged;
If you'd like to be tagged in on these prompts, let me know and I'll happily add you 🙂