Gold Standard

The Gold Standard was a server economic concept where naturally occuring raw gold items became currency.

Overview
The Gold Standard eliminated the need for a seperate, general plugin called IConomy, instead choosing to allow users to not only have to physically carry their money, but allow them to find cash in the wilderness. The choice of the Gold Standard also removed the dependence on a plugin to carry out economic activity in the Badlands. The Gold Standard was generally well recieved. In order to accomadate the need for safe storage and easy access, ATMs in the form of Ender Chests began popping up in public shopping centers around the Badlands. The change to the Gold Standard also sparked a noticible change in architecture and building design, where builders began using little to no gold in their builds, as gold was easier to steal in placed block form and more useful in a player's inventory than in their wall.

Denominations
The denominations for currency are the vanilla gold raw items.

Current Denominations
Despite being made from gold ingots, gold tools, weapons and armor are generally not seen as valuable on the market due to the rather poor performance of golden items compared to other, usually cheaper options. The items can, however, be of special, ceremonial, or sentimental value to players that engage in roleplay scenarios with other players. It is seen as a more viable option to use the salvage ability from MCMMO's Repair skill.
 * Nuggets - Worth 1 gold; the base unit for gold.
 * Ingots - Worth 9 gold
 * Blocks - Worth 91 gold; often used in large purchases or for storage in chests.

Discontinued denominations:
These items were a result of Spout's ability for owners of a server to create special items for the server. They ceased to exist when Spout was discontinued from the server. Because of their value, and the fact they required a user to be playing on the server through the Spout client, Gold Bricks and Latinum blocks were extremely rare. Neither were used for seldom more than storage of large quantities of gold in a small space. Any remaining examples of the items, along with the other specially made spout items were lost when the map change to the Retro Badlands occured, though the removal of spout rendered them useless long before the map changed.
 * Gold Bricks - Worth 729 gold; crafted from 9 gold blocks; texture resembled the brick texture, but solid gold colored.
 * Latinum - Worth 6561 gold; crafted from 9 gold bricks; rarest and most valuable gold item in existance on the Badlands.

History
The Gold Standard traces its roots back to the days before plugins and Bukkit where players would trade items they valued for items they needed, in a common barter system. As Survival Multiplayer began getting more attention and became more advanced, it started being phased out of use by plugins such as IConomy. It wasn't until an involuntary, devastating database wipe, though to be caused by the plugin itself as a crude but advanced anti-cheat/hack/exploit protocol, cleared the bank accounts of every player on the server, likely due to the huge volumes of money being distruibted by Dr3whaha, who was later revealed to be exploiting a bug to gain immense wealth. After the issue was sorted out and the llamas quelled, the owners decided to switch back to the old method of the Gold Standard. The change was made during mid 2012. The Gold Standard Concept has attracted at least 1 plugin developer, who began writing custom plugins for the Badlands to streamline the concept and integrate other ideas into the Gold Standard, such as Tribes.

The Gold Standard borrows its name and basic concept from the real-life, historical economic principle, where gold was recognized as the most valuble substance on the planet and set the basis for nearly every civilization since recorded history.