how much is copper worth?

[claudekennilol]

As a metal, how much is it worth? So if I find a thousand pound hunk how much would it be worth?

[Jeff Merola]

In Pathfinder, it's 50 copper pieces per pound. So a thousand pound hunk of copper would be worth 50,000 cp, or 500 gold pieces.

[Carteeg_Struve]

claudekennilol wrote:

As a metal, how much is it worth? So if I find a thousand pound hunk how much would it be worth?

From a pure weight standpoint?

Well, 50 coins is a pound. 16 ounces to a pound. That's 0.32 oz per coin, and on the exchange 1 oz of copper is US$0.16104.

So at the moment one copper is 5.15328 cents.

It's a nickel... and change. :)

[Edymnion]

Yup, it's 50 coins to the pound, regardless of material. Now if you work that out it gets pretty crazy how big coins must be, but long as you turn your brain off its a lot easier to estimate values.

A pound of copper is worth half a gold. Pound of silver is 5 gold, and a pound of gold is 50 gold.

[kestral287]

To be fair that's for copper coins, not raw copper. It's a decent enough approximation but virtually by default it's inaccurate.

[Jeff Merola]

kestral287 wrote:

To be fair that's for copper coins, not raw copper. It's a decent enough approximation but virtually by default it's inaccurate.

Not according to Ultimate Equipment:

Quote:

For example, gold is 50 gp per pound...

[kestral287]

I don't suppose that quote has any actual context to it?

[Jeff Merola]

It's in the trade goods section, talking about how to determine the price of ore. The rest of the sentence goes on to talk about if ore is X% pure, it would be worth 50*pounds*purity%, but would most likely sell for less than that due to the time needed to smelt and purify it.

[Edymnion]

Yeah, the coins in these types of games derive their value from the value of the metal they are made from, not an artificial value assigned to them by a government.

A gold piece is worth 1 gold because that is the value of 1/50th of a pound of gold, not because the king says thats how much buying power a gold coin has.

[Akerlof]

Edymnion wrote:

Yeah, the coins in these types of games derive their value from the value of the metal they are made from, not an artificial value assigned to them by a government.

A gold piece is worth 1 gold because that is the value of 1/50th of a pound of gold, not because the king says thats how much buying power a gold coin has.

Yep, it's called Commodity Money: Its value is based on the value of the underlying commodity, not the government that issued it. If we wanted to get serious about simulating the real world, merchants would be weighing your coins and checking the purity whenever you tried to buy something, especially when using foreign currency. (Hmm, that sounds like a good explanation of the alternate rules on variability of selling price for found items: The merchant is giving you the same number of coins but some are better than others.)

If you want to run a cloak and dagger or criminal type adventure rather than a hack and slash game, basing the story around a plot to debase a kingdom's currency would work well. Either by criminals milling just a little bit off the edge of every coin, or by the kingdom itself minting coins that are less pure. (See the anime Spice and Wolf, I think the first season? Could be the second, it's been a while.) A government that minted coins that are less pure is creating inflation to spend more than it takes in in tax and other revenue. Like, say, to cover the cost of a war or to hide the effects of a rebellion to outsiders.

Sorry, geeked out for a moment.

[DM_Blake]

Edymnion wrote:

Yup, it's 50 coins to the pound, regardless of material. Now if you work that out it gets pretty crazy how big coins must be, but long as you turn your brain off its a lot easier to estimate values.

Not so very big, actually.

I buy silver in 1 oz. rounds. For those not familiar with the concept, a "round" means it is coin-shaped but it isn't actually a coin backed by any legitimate government. So yeah, 1 oz. coins. That's 16 coins per pound, or roughly 3x larger than a Pathfinder silver piece.

But these silver rounds are barely larger than a US silver dollar (Eisenhower dollar). About the same, give or take (actually, 16 rounds to a pound compared about 18.5 Eisenhower dollars).

In the UK therre is the 25 pence and the 5 pound coins, both at about 28.8 grams which works out to about 16 coins per pound (16 oz. US weight, not the UK currency pound). So they're the same size as my 1 oz. silver "rounds" and these UK coins are 3x bigger than a Pathfinder SP.

Or another comparison is that he US Mint says a standard US Quarter ($0.25) should weigh 5.670 grams which is pretty much exactly 0.0125 pounds. Quick math shows that 80 quarters should weigh almost exactly one pound.

More quick math shows that a Pathfinder coin is approximately 60% heavier than a US Quarter.

That's not really all that big.

It's certainly not so big that you have to "turn your brain off" to imagine coins that are slightly larger than US Quarters and actually only 1/3 the weight of some coins currently or recently in circulation in modern 1st-world countries.

[Edymnion]

Gold has a density of roughly 19g/cm^3.
Copper has a density of roughly 9g/cm^3.

1/50th of a pound is about 9g.
Volume of a cylinder is pi×r^2×h.

So a copper coin has a volume of 1 cubic centimeter. The gold coin has a volume of let's round to 0.5 cubic centimeters.

If we say a copper coin is the diameter of a quarter (24.26mm), then it is...

1=3.1415×(12.13)^2×h
1=462mm×h
h= about 2 mm thick.

Quarter is 1.75mm thick, so that works pretty well. A copper is a quarter, more or less.

Working with that, half the volume of a quarter is actually about the size of a dime. (Quarter is about 800 cubic mm, a dime is about 350 cubic mm)

Dunno about you, but when I think about a bag of gold coins, I don't picture a bag of dimes.