Board Thread:Midian Q&A/@comment-24302820-20150928201229/@comment-24302820-20160424233136

The Association is certainly large and united enough to have a solitary and collective currency. Though theirs is a somewhat loose federation, a single accepted monetary system goes a long way towards maintaining that unity. To make things easier on all involved--players, GMs, and the characters as well--I would suggest making one of the coins fairly transferable between the Associated currency and the florin or ducat. If not the same value, then a simple multiple or divisor, to make conversions easier.

I can foresee a potential plot point with Colt issuing its own coins. Cultural similarities would likely lead to a similar similarity of specie. That is, it would look as close as Confederate money did to US currency of the time, and being coins, quite likely even closer in appearance, especially at first glance. I can see Colt Coins being either the same size and metal purity, or maybe just a little bit worse. Either would cause problems with them getting mixed into circulation in the Association, like Canadian coins mixed with US. As unincorporated baronies--or the rest of the Western Territories in general--wouldn't properly fall under the purview of the Association and its monetary laws, this could make these Colt Coins a serious nuisance for the government of the Association. Colt's position on the outskirts of the Western Territories, and thus closer to Byzant and the Elder Kingdoms, could increase its fungibility to outsiders, thus exacerbating the problem.

Another idea would be one stolen from certain libertarian thinkers. That is, it wouldn't be the government involved in minting coins, but the larger and more powerful banks. This would remove the issues of how coins' values may differ between the major and minor baronies, whether minor baronies can mint their own, and put an interesting slant on bank robberies, namely that it's pretty obvious who you robbed, as their coins would have the bank's mark. The downsides to this system are many, based as it is solely upon a non-enforcible cultural standard for coin size, and upon nearly everyone having a sufficiently high level of trust in the issuing banks. If that trust fails, so too does the value of the coins, and eventually their value as coins. Control over the minting of coins has historically been as important an aspect of governmental control as the monopoly over violence. So there's that. "Social order relies on two things, Monica: the state's economy and the state's war powers."

- Erik Killmonger