The base value is this. they are rare. It is something that is hard to get and thus is valuable just based on scarcity.

Follow this example. The Honus Wagner Cigar Box Baseball card is the most valuable card in baseball. thousands of them were printed but only less then a dozen remain. The card in itself has no intrinsic value other then the fact that it is rare.

If Emeralds can not be traded for and they are very hard to find and I have a stack of emerald blocks that is a rare item. Thus it makes it valuable.

What Lom said is right. I can take an example out of Team Fortress 2.

There are 2 bats, same type, same skin, except one records kills. Yet the one that doesn't record kills is more rare, therefore, even though it has less use, it is worth a ton more than the other. Rarity sells, especially when a use is to make things look nice which I believe is the reason most of the blocks in Minecraft exist. (Clay/bricks have no use except to make things look nice, and they sell for much higher than most blocks)

What I really have noticed in this thread is the sheer lack of real concrete points. So, being someone who's been testing this trading for a few days, I'll provide what I know.

There is one trade on that list which stands out. I currently have a villager (not talking about this server, fyi) trapped in my house which has a deal, 20 Paper - 1 Emerald.

For every stack of sugarcane, I get 3.2 emeralds.

Now sugarcane is an item with a capping point, meaning it's not always in demand. There's a certain cap on how much you need, around the amount to make 15-30 bookcases and enough for speed potions, but here, it gets unlimited trade-in value. On a large sugarcane farm, I can easily get a full inventory of sugarcane every 3-5 minutes. I can craft this into paper and trade it for ~115 emeralds.

What can 115 emeralds get me?

Funny you asked, it can get me:

460 Bottles of Enchanting. That's three lvl 30 enchants, and most of the way to a fourth one. Netting anywhere from 3-10k credits from selling the enchanted items.

345 Glowstone. On a good day, I used to be able to get 1200 a stack for glowstone...for some reason. This would yield around 6500 credits.

800 Porkchops/Steak. Keeps me fed for a while, not all that expensive, but again decreases the value of food.

575 Glass.

4 Sets of Chainmail armor.

Over 1000 cookies.

The point I'm trying to make here, is that you can transfer a useless commodity (sugarcane/paper) into several other slightly more useful commodities, which cost more. This won't fix the economy, the only thing that will do that is to inflate the living hell out of credits. Which would be done by providing a high trade-in on diamonds/gold, but unfortunately that's been denied several times.

So you can clearly see here that you can get hundreds of emeralds every few minutes, and make well more money than mining diamonds. You can make more money farming sugarcane for 60 minutes that mining diamonds for a month.

~Sequel

This is pretty much why I was saying not to allow trades where you trade an emerald for something else, but allowing 'selling' trades .This allows pepole to 'work' to build trading systems, or just plain going round a village trying to find the trade you want, giving them emeralds to sell or use, but not allowing them access to ridiculous things like glowy or enchanting bottles.

You know, I personally would have quite liked emeralds to be kept for trading. Obviously, thanks to CERTAIN Minetown members in possession of large Mob Traps/Farms, this would mean that there would be a flood of emeralds.

However, I think someone on this thread mentioned nerfing the system? If you removed the common farming items from the trade list, such as porkchop, etc, and removed the possibility to get say bottles o' enchanting, diamond armor, then I personally don't think it'd affect the economy too hard.

Then again, I didn't take Economics for my subjects, and I no longer care about the economic standing of Minetown, as long as I have my patch of land to build on.

Dont allow villager trading. I rather see our economy getting better than ruining it.

I think we should make that 1 emerald is worth 128 or 256 diamonds. Isnt this overpriced? NO.

Since emeralds are rare (and diamond blocks are fancy) it could be a new must have item to show people how rich you are. Remember those old times that you were rich when you had 20 diamond blocks? We could recreate this again with emerald blocks. Some people say that diamond blocks are worth much. No. You can simply get around 15 diamond blocks for voting for the server twice a day. That are 135 diamonds or roughly 1/0.5 emerald depending on the prices listed above. This means that 9 days of voting gets you 1 emerald block. This will give you like 4 emerald blocks a month. This isnt much. I know, but why do i want this high price than? If 50 people vote for 4 emerald blocks a month this will result in 200 emerald blocks added each month. Add the emerald blocks mined each month and that will result in something like 210-220. If we decrease the price of emeralds it will be the same like the diamonds price crash. Too many emeralds will be added a month so the market filled up faster, resulting in a price drop. Remember that emerald blocks should be rare and somewhat impressive to other players.

(You get MTC from voting. You will first have to buy diamonds from that and after that you can exchange them in the bank for one of the prices listed above)

I might have made some faults. Feel free to edit those and feel free to comment on this.

I really like this idea. Although I would have liked to be able to make a villager 'farm', with a storage system for trades, I think nemenix is right, Seeing as how rare emeralds are to mine, the only way to get them (pretty much, apart from the very occasional one or two from mining, will be getting them from the cs or admin shop. It would really be a sign or being rch, which would be good for the economy. Although I dont see myself getting many emerald blocks though. The only thing that would mess up the system is the fact that certain pepole have used the time when it was enabled to get like 2000+ emeralds.

"mojang did not look good @ this"

lol are u serious?

Do you think they make these things for servers with "Currency" made from iron gold or diamond?

They mostly make it for singeplayer or vannila servers ...

Dont go bitch off a company because YOU think they didnt look good at it

I think diamond, gold and iron should be able to be traded for emeralds, but everything else cannot be bought for emeralds.

So, 4d => 1e,

But disable 20pork => 1e and make it 1e => 20pork ONLY

That way you can use normal currencies for whatever the villagers are selling without making prices drop. Maybe increase the cost of chainmail a little bit and / or remove the saddle, but it wouldn't the server affect that much...

As i said before just have the blacksmith, priest and libraian deleted very easily and you will no longer have the trouble but still be able to trade without stupid things.