Disclaimer: Nothing in this post is to be construed as financial advice.
Yes, the economy sucks for the entire world basically. Inflation is off its rocker, and it is supposed to get worse. Many of you are losing your Entropia budgets to inflation. Your electric bill, your fuel bill, your food... So here I am to present one option to add some extra funds to your budget that has always worked for me, its simple enough, really. Nope, you don't have to buy anything or sign up for anything. Just take a close look at what you already have. It hasn't been my intention to deviate from all things Entropia, but since Entropia for most of us requires money to be playable, lets face it, non-depositing is only going to work if you went that route from day 1... Someone who's deposited thousands of dollars into Entropia is simply not going to be satisfied to sweat for a few cents an hour. And its bad enough that many of those people have been forced to do so.
The in-game means of earning free peds either require investing a LOT of deposited money, i.e. shares and deeds... Or investing a LOT of time for very little monetary gain, i.e. sweating or fruit and stone walking. Virtually any real-world activity pays more than sweating, and with a lot less effort. There is one commodity we all have to some degree or another at any given time. And volumes of it generally pass through our hands at some point. This commodity is loaded with desirable anomalies that collectors are paying ridiculous premiums for. What am I talking about, you ask?
This isn't a get rich quick, or slow, scheme. This isn't a scheme of any kind. And the sought after items of interest are perfectly legal and sell themselves without any effort at all to speak of.
Coins. Specifically, coins with errors. Mint Errors. Also paper money have errors too.
Of course error collecting isn't limited to coins and paper money. There are errors to be found in baseball cards, or any other printed or manufactured collectible that isn't normally supposed to have errors. The no-name Frank Thomas card sells for five digits, and yes, I've had a real one offered to me and I passed on it not knowing there actually were late 80's and early 90's baseball cards worth something :( But its ok. I try not to think about the things I've missed out on.
But the beauty of coins is that almost everyone collects coins. Collectors are found in every level of society, in every part of the world. And usually only the smallest of towns are without coin dealers; pawn shops usually will buy and sell coins, but not always. And even if you run an advertisement in your local classifieds to sell the mint errors you've found, you probably won't have to wait for long for someone to be interested; but naturally you want to be smart about meeting a buyer. Public place, maybe not go alone, etc. Just be smart, things can and do go wrong, though fortunately not as often as it could.
"How much could an error possibly be worth?"
As of this post, a 1982 Roosevelt dime with no mintmark is actually selling for around $150, easily selling for that is, and they aren't that uncommon.
Then there is the matter of paper money. Mismatched serial numbers on the same bill are worth thousands of dollars. Serial numbers with all digits the same are also readily selling for $1000 to $5000.
If you have jugs of coins sitting around, hell, you can even look at them while you sweat in Entropia for that matter... You could have a fortune easily enough found.
Most desirable errors are double-dies, which will appear as slightly, or very pronounced doubling of letters and numbers or otherwise some portion of the design of the coin. Or you can have a mintmark that is doubled. If that is the only thing doubled, you have a repunched mintmark. But, if you have two different mint marks on top of each other, S over D or etc, these can be extremely valuable.
Mule errors exist where the wrong two coins are stamped on the same coin... You may have a quarter that somehow managed to end up with a dollar being struck on the other side.These can be insanely valuable.
You can have blank planchets which are worth anywhere from $5 to $100 each depending on what denomination the planchet is. It will literally look like a blank disc of metal, but it will be of the same size of the coin that was supposed to be struck on it.
You can have coins with chunks of metal missing from the surface like it was popped out, which are lamination errors, and indeed thats what happens due to imperfections in the sheet metal from when it was made.
The errors you can find are absolutely endless, all you got to do is figure out what coins you have, look up the errors for those particular coins and those years of coins, and you should have no problem finding values or at least images of what you are looking for. A simple search for mint errors will give you some ideas too.
I really won't go into a lot more depth here, since if the topic were a horse, it would have been beaten to the point its a mere grease spot on the ground. Probably a million books and millions of webpages exist on the topic of mint errors and coin collecting. I am just here to point out every day someone is finding thousands of dollars worth of highly sought after errors or varieties. If its not you, it will be them, and I'd rather it be you than them.
What happens to Entropia if everyone suddenly has more money to deposit? Everyone plays more. More trades are done, more items and gear change hands. Everyone does better. The game does better. The whole point of this blog is to help everyone in the game do better. I don't necessarily care if Mindark does better, they are literally bending us all over on loot right now. Nevermind the strongboxes... Those are so bad lately I don't even get the obligatory garland or candy cane anymore. I probably will never open another Xmas box again to be honest.
Good luck to you all! And I hope this has helped you find a new path to refilling the old war chest.
