The beast of the coffers

Once upon a time, there was a beautiful island called Degendaland. On the island lived little people ruled by a king, and the king had a formidable magician. Every time the king desired, he would ask the magician to make him pieces of money to spend, and the magician would immediately make them for the king. The king really liked the power of the magician. With this power, he could pay for everything he wanted, without even having to make people give their pieces of money to be put in his coffers as tax. Every time he felt like it, he could give pieces of money to the biscuit sellers in exchange for his favorite biscuits. The biscuit sellers from all the islands liked exchanging their biscuits for the king’s pieces of money. They would later exchange the money for the fish or the great houses of the island. Every time he felt like it, the king could also play and practice his gambling skills. Sometimes he would play and win, that would make him quite happy, and he would talk about it all day long. Sometimes he would play and lose, he did not like that, but it wasn’t too big an issue, the magician would make up the missing pieces of money in his coffers. ...

February 6, 2024

The ships of spice-money are empty

Once upon a time, there was a beautiful island called Degendaland. On the island lived little people ruled by a mighty king, and the king had a terrific magician. The magician was able to create any amount of pieces of money that the king desired. Some years the king would make the magician create very few new pieces of money, just a few to replace the ones lost at sea or that children had dropped in the wells of the island. Other years, the king would make the magician create way too many new pieces of money, and he would spend them. The new pieces of money would slowly travel the island, from the king’s personal shoppers to the shoppers’ suppliers, from the suppliers to the suppliers’ providers, etc. Slowly, from hand to hand and from shop to shop, everyone would have more pieces of money to buy the same houses and other stuff, so everyone could bid more pieces of money to buy the same thing, and in the end everyone needed to spend more pieces of money to buy things than before. This side effect had the tendency to upset the little people, and the king wanted a way out of that. ...

October 14, 2023

Little Degen and Mister Fiat

Once upon a time, there was a beautiful island called Degendaland. On Degendaland there were little people living their little people lives in their 1000 great houses, and the 1000 great houses were all the greatest treasure of the little people. Degen play, amateur mode Little Degen was one of them. He sometimes liked to play with some of his pieces of money, trading up or trading down, depending on his intuition. He wasn’t too bad at it, he even knew the ancient magic: “Buy low, sell high”. Sometimes he played and won. He was happy to party with his friends to celebrate when that happened. Sometimes he played and lost, there was no party with friends those times. One day he went in with a 100x leverage on his game. He wasn’t careful and started loosing his bet. He was pretty sure of his bet though, he tried adding some money to his bet by borrowing from a few friends. Unfortunately it just wasn’t his day, he lost the bet and went back to work after that. ...

August 12, 2023