Currency/Tinker

The tinker is a unit of currency.

The tinker is a small coin, usually weighing 4 ounces, and is usually a fairly pure ingot of tin. It's fairly annoying to use day to day, since the value of the metal is the primary worth, and tin isn't super valuable. However, their value is fixed to the repair of a pot. Two slips of tin will get your pot repaired, and thirty will buy a new saucepan. Because of this they are most often carried by children to buy small items, and collected to trade to travelling tinkers.

Peddlers and tinkers are the most common travelers between different cities, and the outlying towns rarely use minted coinage, and generally barter. Peddlers therefore pickup goods in the cities with coinage, trade that during their routes, and then offloads what they pickup in the towns for money. The peddlers often travel with tinkers (or are tinkers themselves), and do small item repairs (mostly pots and pans and knives). The tinkers tend to trade for some goods, or money, but they tend to have less need for a wide range of items, and therefore prefer to work with money.

Due to geography, the peddler routes begin and end at mountains or seas, and most of the mountains contain mining towns, and therefore the mining towns began to smelt very small ingots of tin, called slips, that can be placed in a tin crucible, and easily used in a repair. Therefore the tinkers use these in their repairs, but they are also useful as currency in themselves, allowing the tinkers to pickup metals on their route fairly cheaply, as well as be paid.

The fact that these coins will be bought eagerly by any travelling tinker, and can be traded for a standard set of goods, they are basically a perfect currency. As a result they are a very common cheap currency.