Black Dye, the stable commodity

i'd rather just use lockpicks, but then all the FFFers would become rich lol (lower price mechants)

Hmmm ; if all the super duper rich people would stop stacking their ectoes and start doing something with it [read as sell to obsidian buyer / sell to merchant ] the ectoes would rise =)

Unlike the unstable price of black dyes because they accualy get used

I agree with the op. I always invested in black dye instead of ectos and right before Factions came out I just invested all my cash in blacks. I knew new armor would come out, thereby reducing the demand for FOW and indirectly lowering ecto prices. Ectos and shards fluctuate in price a lot but everyone always want black dye.

Yeah, but when you step outside, there's a huge chance that anything you kill is going to drop gold coins, whereas there is an infinitesimally small chance of that same creature dropping a black dye.

A lot of people have played for two years, and most of them have probably only gotten at most four or five black dyes in that entire period. However, I'd bet those same people have gone outside and gotten gold within the first 30 seconds.

Black dyes have much lower total volume traded than ectos. They're much more vulnerable to sudden market changes. For example increased demand caused by release of a new dyable event hat can cause a pretty large price spike. Ecto volume is so massive that even the introduction of a completely new and highly popular sink for them - the Chaos Gloves - didn't cause any visible price spike, but they may have actually prevented a substantial ecto price drop.

The only other commodity that could replace ectos would be Lockpicks, the only problem is 100k+7 stacks of them is only ~2.2mil, not enough for some of the highend trades. I don't consider town holders to bee any problem. I would expect the resell price to go down, and if every highend trader and ecto holder moved their fortunes to stacks of lockpicks, there would be tons of them in circulation, and the price at which you could liquidate them could drop to or even under 1200g. Buying from trader cannot generate infinite profit.

Not at all its a perfectly reasonable solution.
The reason people use ectos lockpicks black dye etc is the money limitation.

If it were possible to own 20 billion platinum or to buy something for 270,000 platinum then we wouldn't need to use anything other than money.

Adding a coin above platinum would solve the problem, I am pretty certain the limitation on money was an attempt to manage the economy but people being how they are they bypassed it by trading comodities that were valuable and fairly stable.


edit
If Black dye drops much more frequently in pre then it couldn't be used anyway.
You would have to own Prophesies and stay in pre to mine the black gold, all other players would be locked out.

I think pretty soon lockpicks will replace Ectos if they continue to decrease in value.

adding a coin above plat wont solve anything, what it will do is raise the prices of items. because now we can offer more than 100k in trade from just money, so the prices will go up.

so lets figure 100 plat = 1 new higher coin. so now you have to collection 100 of the new coin to buy the uber hard to find items which means longer farm time, more bots. oh and guess what, those super uber items, cost 100 of the new coin + 100plat + ectos. didnt solve anything did it. now we just have to do more work to make the money, poor people stay poor, rich people get richer.

please no new coins.

Wrong.
If a sudden update removed any gold caps, so players could hold as much as they wanted in storage and on characters, and be able to do no-limits huge trades, no prices would change. (Except an inevitable 'panic' ecto price drop spike, later to stabilize at a lower level than current)

Even if they added a new coin type (1M) that would equal 1000 plat = 1million gold and let us do single trades of unlimited size, no price would go up because of that. That update wouldn't generate any new money, people wouldn't suddenly become richer, able to spend more for the same goods. Removing the limits wouldn't generate any inflation.

I repeat: the amount of gold in the economy would be unaffected. The only items that would sell at prices above 100plat would be those selling for 100plat+some ectos before.
People selling large amounts of ectos to trader wouldn't increase the overall wealth in circulation, the effect would be opposite - a few thousand ecto stacks sold to trader could drop their price as low as 2k buy price, a massive amount of wealth sunk into the npc's 'profit'. Stabilization of ecto price would sink even more gold from the economy - other players would slowly buy the ectos to use them.

In order to push ANY currency other than ecto you have to convince people who use it to trade to switch.

Those same people have stacks of ectoes and would loose substantial money when switch happens.

Their agreement is not gonna happen and you don't have enough monetary pull to force switch (if you had resources to shift currency (ecto stacks), you would loose money because of change and thus would not even think about currency change.)

Forget currency change, its pointless.