Another evidence on how money arises naturally in the market, this time a very curious one.
This is an explanation on why the game developers decided to change the game monetary system and the restults they got.
Previously the game imposed a unique currency that they called "gold". But dont get fooled by the name. This "gold" currency was fiat. You would get "gold" for killing monsters and other tasks and the game could create as much as it needed. To avoid inflating too much they had some artificial "gold" sinks where you had to perform certain tasks regularly that would consume "gold". It was a imposed and centrally managed currency.
But this system promoted a bunch of unwanted behaviours (just like in the present system, who would have guessed right? ) and they observerd other RPG games to see how they dealt with the monetary issue. They liked how the monetary system behaved in some games, and discovered those games had no centrally planned and mandated currency system, and that competing currencies had arrised naturally, using scarce items in the game.
They are implementing a competing currency system now and they are very happy with the preliminary results. Who would have guessed
The whole thing is an interesting read and put a smile in my face to see the ingenuity of this people and how they found out in practice that voluntary exchange is always the best solution:
http://pathofexile.com/news/2011-02-08/dev-diary-currency