[Discuss] Feature suggestion - Stealing gold from banks

[Thomas Dalton]

This is a suggestion to makes bonds more than just gold you can't
spend - it makes it gold you're owed by the realm/bank, which is what
it's meant to be.

It requires 3 fairly simple changes:

1) When bonds are issued (taxes, the financial actions page, gold
stolen from prisoners and converted, etc.) increment a variable.
2) When bonds are cashed, decrement said variable.
3) Add options for infils, looters, rulers and bankers (and maybe
dukes, as the vaults are in their cities) to take money from the
bank's vaults (different from the tax vaults), decrementing the
variable.

Option 3 means the variable (which represents the amount of gold in
the bank vaults - let's not worry about each city having it's own
vault, BM gold can travel between cities instantaneously, it's easier)
can be different from the total number of bonds owned by members of
the realm. If someone trys to cash bonds and there isn't enough - they
can't do it. So, if it starts to look like the bank is going to run
out of money, everyone is going to try and get their bonds cashed
first - a bank run.

The banker should be able to designate part of the tax income to be
withheld (incrementing the variable without issuing bonds) to pay back
what looters steal. Anyone that's allowed to just take money out
(ruler/banker/duke) should have an option to give it back again, to
allow RPing it as if it were a bank loan.

Most of the time, it's just going to be infils and looters taking
small amounts of gold and the tax system will replace it each week (if
the banker wants it to, anyway), so even if the bank does run out of
gold, it won't be for long, however a corrupt council member could run
away with all the gold, causing major economic problems for the realm.
 Of course, a non-corrupt ruler could take the gold to use in the war
effort, expecting to pay it back with the spoils of war  (so if they
lose the war, they're in trouble) - it's up to each realm to set their
own laws about what council members can do with the gold entrusted to
the banks.

It seems like quite an easy thing to implement (unless I've missed
something - I haven't seen the code, so there could something else it
will break) which would add a lot of realism to the games economics.
And it adds more room for corruption, which is always a good thing in
my book.


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