People have already done auctions on forums before. And auctions always bump prices up way beyond what they should be cause it's always little increases in price per bid, but then you step back and realize you payed double or triple what the item was worth.

@NutjobBob I've always been curious why diamonds are so highly valued since mending was introduced. I think I've used less than 4 diamond blocks for crafting since the last reset. There's half a stack of diamond blocks sitting in my echest that I doubt I'll ever use for anything except trading.
Is this driven by pvp, losing/breaking armour? I'm genuinely curious what everyone actually does with all these diamonds to make them so valuable.

Bragging rights. That's how I see it anyway.

@Derndeff I do not see any value in emeralds, because I can do nothing with them. If someone was selling something I wanted in emeralds, I would find them valuable.

@Dennari43 Forget the use of diamonds versus emeralds, cause I know that's a reason people don't like emeralds. It's because you can't make tools and gear with emeralds, but diamonds you can. But we're not talking resources here. We're talking currency and economy. Diamonds are a resource. Emeralds are directly intended by mojang to be for trading, at least villager trading. They are meant to be minecraft currency. That might be why they don't have that many other uses for them.

@Derndeff

@Dennari43 All it takes is a few people to open shops, even temporary shops, in order to start the movement.

This is what we are trying to do. But it's hard to convince people when others pop in and say they shouldn't trust us because they wouldn't trust us. It will take more than just me to do it. That's what this thread is for. To get others to use it too so we can fix the little issues before they become big issues.

One of the problems I see with emeralds is the villager trades.
In one hand you can get tons of emeralds with crops or silk (which you can obtain lots of) but on the other hand you can get an overpowered book (as mending, sharp V, Eff V,Prot IV, etc) for as low as 5 emeralds (or 6 if you consider the book) which can sell for 4-8 diamonds each, so a convertion is very hard to make. (bc if 6 emmies=4-8 diamonds then the tons of emmies you can get with crops would convert almost fully into diamonds)

Why would we need a new currency system? What are you trying to do with it and what would it improve?

@Jordi223b One of the problems I see with emeralds is the villager trades.
In one hand you can get tons of emeralds with crops or silk (which you can obtain lots of) but on the other hand you can get an overpowered book (as mending, sharp V, Eff V,Prot IV, etc) for as low as 5 emeralds (or 6 if you consider the book) which can sell for 4-8 diamonds each, so a convertion is very hard to make. (bc if 6 emmies=4-8 diamonds then the tons of emmies you can get with crops would convert almost fully into diamonds)

Then maybe we should stop considering ordinary books as overpowered. Having full enchants isn't overpowered, it just means you're geared to the fullest extent in vanilla gameplay. People thought the elytra was overpowered, but maybe mojang is shifting minecraft around and doesn't see it that way. Maybe it really is supposed to be a somewhat ordinary item meant for travel. Recently, there have been a lot of "overpowered" items added to minecraft. Elytra being one. Totems are another. Mending. And so on. Maybe minecraft is changing focus, making it easier to survive(more fun to survive) so we can do more things when they update more. Who knows, each update changes the game a bit more and more each time, giving us better stuff to lash out at and consider OP. This thinking everything new-ish is OP and worth a lot is one of the issues we would have to fix with conversions, because regardless of the trade being 6 emmies or 50 emmies, the player will still sell the book for the same amount of diamonds because we haven't set any standards for converting emmies to dias. We are looking at books and items and immediately guessing what it should be worth in diamonds instead of what it should be worth in emmies, which is where the crazy leaps in prices between the two come from. And you're comparing a villager trade price to the more expensive and profitable price a player sells said villager bought books from. If villagers traded books for diamonds, mojang would have to create a diamond nugget to account for the price books are worth in diamonds. A mending book, at it's most expensive, would be worth maybe 5/9ths of a diamond when you compare it to emerald price. Here's an example:
Say a mending book cost 10 emmies from villager trade.

Villager trade=10 emmies
We tend to take that book and sell it for, lets say 5 diamonds.
Player trade=5 dia

I'll just make up a conversion for now and say 1 dia equals 20 emmies.

So, the player buys the 10 emmies book and would sell it for 5 dia(5x20 emmies) or 100 emmies
That seems like a ridiculous price for a bookshop! Wonder why?
Because 5 dia is way too much for a book.

What about the other way now?

well if the trade is 10 emmies and 20 emmies is 1 dia, then the villager trade actually costs half a diamond.

That means the other 4 1/2 diamonds are complete profit. That's like if a store sold a candy bar at 20 dollars instead of 2 so they could get an 18 dollar profit out of it. There is too much of a profit margin for the seller. This is one reason emmies seem so worthless. We overvalue most items through diamonds, so emerald prices seem way out of wack. Well it's because they are out of wack.

@CreeperLord170 Why would we need a new currency system? What are you trying to do with it and what would it improve?

Not a new currency system. Better recognition and use of the real currency system of minecraft. Using what mojang gave us the way it was meant to be used. Adding a smaller currency might help trading flow better in pricing items too.

^

I concur, the system is sloppy.

@Dennari43 Not a new currency system. Better recognition and use of the real currency system of minecraft. Using what mojang gave us the way it was meant to be used. Adding a smaller currency might help trading flow better in pricing items too.

If we are not trying to make a currency system, why do we have to give a fixed ratio to emeralds? Everyone have different opportunity cost in producing different items and they also have different demands.
If a player have a higher demand in diamonds he would be willing to pay more for emeralds and vice versa. There's no need to fix it at a ratio.

And regarding your book example, the selling price of books is mainly controlled by its demand and supply, production cost would only affect the overall selling price when it's close to the selling price. People are willing to pay you a high amount of stuff to get what they want. Using your example, assuming that the value of 5 diamonds is much higher than the the production cost. If you think it's too expensive for the value of the product, and you are able to get the same items for a lower cost, why would you buy it at all. The selling price is at 5 diamonds because player are willing to pay for it. If players are not willing to pay 5 diamonds to have that mending books, the price would drop as none is buying them and the seller would still want to sell them to make profit. The price of mending books can also drop when there are more supply and selllers are competing for deals.

After all, I don't think that we would need a fixed value for any items and we won't need a currency for trading.

@CreeperLord170 If we are not trying to make a currency system, why do we have to give a fixed ratio to emeralds? Everyone have different opportunity cost in producing different items and they also have different demands.
If a player have a higher demand in diamonds he would be willing to pay more for emeralds and vice versa. There's no need to fix it at a ratio.

And regarding your book example, the selling price of books is mainly controlled by its demand and supply, production cost would only affect the overall selling price when it's close to the selling price. People are willing to pay you a high amount of stuff to get what they want. Using your example, assuming that the value of 5 diamonds is much higher than the the production cost. If you think it's too expensive for the value of the product, and you are able to get the same items for a lower cost, why would you buy it at all. The selling price is at 5 diamonds because player are willing to pay for it. If players are not willing to pay 5 diamonds to have that mending books, the price would drop as none is buying them and the seller would still want to sell them to make profit. The price of mending books can also drop when there are more supply and selllers are competing for deals.

After all, I don't think that we would need a fixed value for any items and we won't need a currency for trading.

I was never the one on here that suggested fixed values. We need competition or else there'll be monopolies on items, so prices will range no matter what. And people can still freely price things however they want, depending on their needs or wants. There should just be an overall understood ratio of emerald to diamond so it can be converted back and forth to allow for emerald currency to better work its way into the system without ripping people off with unfair conversions or emerald prices. This would just be an understood number so no one ends up buying an item for way less emeralds or way more emeralds than it is worth. I'm literally asking just for a guideline conversion here that people can follow(if they want to), not a fixed system.

And concerning the book example. If someone was selling the one item you needed in order to survive and no one else was selling it, that's called a monopoly. That person can jack the price up to way more than it's worth, which they do. Players can go buy that item somewhere else though I guess... but no one else is selling...
So they have to pay the rip off price in order to get the item or wait until they are capable of getting it on their own(which may be never if it's a certain book), another shop opens up that sells it cheaper(book shops rarely open, it's usually a small group of people that always sell books, all expensive), or they just never get the item. There's a difference here between wanting an item and needing an item.
Nvm, the book price comparison wasn't even the real point of that demonstration. It was intended to show how overpriced an item is [i]because[i] we still think the item is OP when it really isn't anymore. If you went back throughout the updates and what people considered op, everything would have at one point been considered it. But as updates come and go, new items take the OP spot on the shelf and the others need to shuffle down the line. But for some reason everyone wants to hold onto the belief that certain items should maintain their OP status, even though they are nothing new anymore. It's not that hard to get mending and other books and enchants and villagers sell them super cheap sometimes. Why are they still being sold for way more than they are worth? I know, the monopoly on them right now. But no one is fixing that. I don't mean admin intervention either. I mean player based fixing.

@Dennari43 I was never the one on here that suggested fixed values. We need competition or else there'll be monopolies on items, so prices will range no matter what. And people can still freely price things however they want, depending on their needs or wants. There should just be an overall understood ratio of emerald to diamond so it can be converted back and forth to allow for emerald currency to better work its way into the system without ripping people off with unfair conversions or emerald prices. This would just be an understood number so no one ends up buying an item for way less emeralds or way more emeralds than it is worth. I'm literally asking just for a guideline conversion here that people can follow(if they want to), not a fixed system.

And concerning the book example. If someone was selling the one item you needed in order to survive and no one else was selling it, that's called a monopoly. That person can jack the price up to way more than it's worth, which they do. Players can go buy that item somewhere else though I guess... but no one else is selling...
So they have to pay the rip off price in order to get the item or wait until they are capable of getting it on their own(which may be never if it's a certain book), another shop opens up that sells it cheaper(book shops rarely open, it's usually a small group of people that always sell books, all expensive), or they just never get the item. There's a difference here between wanting an item and needing an item.
Nvm, the book price comparison wasn't even the real point of that demonstration. It was intended to show how overpriced an item is [i]because[i] we still think the item is OP when it really isn't anymore. If you went back throughout the updates and what people considered op, everything would have at one point been considered it. But as updates come and go, new items take the OP spot on the shelf and the others need to shuffle down the line. But for some reason everyone wants to hold onto the belief that certain items should maintain their OP status, even though they are nothing new anymore. It's not that hard to get mending and other books and enchants and villagers sell them super cheap sometimes. Why are they still being sold for way more than they are worth? I know, the monopoly on them right now. But no one is fixing that. I don't mean admin intervention either. I mean player based fixing.

Well, although I personally don't see much of that problem with the current state (maybe I'm rich) but I'm sure that more positive competition is good for a healthy market in a long term.

I see the arguments on both sides. There are pros and cons. Perhaps a simulation would be in order? select a certain group of players and have them operate under a "Proposed Economy" and see if it flourishes or if it will die. I would be very interested in seeing how that would play out. I would invest in research and building a facility for such a simulation.