I have to wonder, are the “pebbles” here a reference to the quasi-currency in the “Monk and Robot” novels?
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Great question! And surprisingly, no it isn’t! Though that blogpost had come out just a few months after the first Monk & Robot book was released, neither @tsyesika nor I had read it at the time. Jessica had been thinking about the design for the Pebble Bank for a few years before encountering Goblins. I gave it the name “Pebble Bank”, but it is @tsyesika’s design.
The reason for the name was that when I was trying to understand Jessica’s design, the way she first proposed it to me was, as the design is in the blogpost, in terms of exchanging the smallest fungible unit of currency (though you can create lumped units of currency with a small modification). So many small numbers of the small individual units, that it felt like pebbles on a large beach.
I only recently read the Monk & Robot books. They are lovely and refreshing! It did strike me that you could use Jessica’s pebble bank as a way to implement the “pebs” system, or a starting point for thinking about such a system.
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