On Fri, Feb 26, 2016 at 4:05 PM, Craig Berry <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:
As soon as you start applying real-world economic thinking to Traveller, you start nudging the game in a post-scarcity, perhaps post-human direction that looks more like Star Trek or Banks's Culture novels than the gritty, hardscrabble Traveller future we all know and love.

On Fri, Feb 26, 2016 at 12:43 AM, Tim <xxxxxx@little-possums.net> wrote:
On Earth, the value of gold is mostly due to the sparsity of deposits
near the surface. . . Virtually all of the accessible gold in the solar system is still out
there in asteroids.

<trying to think of a non-fiat reason to maintain gold scarcity in the OTU . . . >

Ah ha!

Let's blame Grandfather. He had a very high tech level and a relatively long stretch of time at that level. So he used automated Von Neumann robots to mine all the easily-accessible deposits of precise metals, leaving behind only the more marginal deposits for the poor moderns of the TU.

What did Grandfather need with all those precious metals, you ask? Why, they formed an essential part of the Whatzit Machine he had to build, in order to the Very Important Thing, of course! :)

--
Richard Aiken

"Never insult anyone by accident."  Robert A. Heinlein
"I studied the Koran a great deal. I came away from that study with the conviction there have been few religions in the world as deadly to men as Muhammed." Alexis de Tocqueville (1843)
"We know a little about a lot of things; just enough to make us dangerous." Dean Winchester
"It has been my experience that a gun doesn't care who pulls its trigger." Newton Knight (as portrayed by Matthew McConaughey), to a scoffing Confederate tax collector facing the weapons held by Knight's young children and wife.