WHAT AM I HOLDING?
What you're holding is a Lorxus Favor! You have one because you've done Lorxus a significant and inconveniencing favor, and they've given you this token to mark that they are indebted to you for it; or because you've traded for, bought, or received it from someone else, likely for a similar reason. The current floor value of the Lorxus Favor can be found at lorx.us/favorvalue, and Lorxus maintains a Fediverse presence for the experimental economy at @lorxusfavor@yiff.life .
WHY DOES IT EXIST?
Lorxus had for a long time had several ideas kicking around that they wanted to pursue and develop further.
The first of these was what it meant for something to look like a coin. Certainly a metal washer looks more like the archetypal coin than a pebble or clod of dirt does, but a penny looks somewhat more like the archetypal coin than a washer, a quarter looks more like the archetypal coin than a penny, and a Morgan silver dollar looks a LOT like the archetypal coin. They decided that the archetypal coin is made of metal, has text in old prestigious languages you don't care about, looks ornate, has prestigious-looking plant branches, and has reeded edges; the result is what you hold in your hand.
The second was an attempt to deal with their moderately strong issues with social anxiety, and in trying to ask friends for things that they were likely willing to provide, but that would clearly inconvenience those friends.
A third was an experiment in value: it seems to Lorxus that liquid asset value should be scale-invariant, that is, while income value is log-linear after a certain point, liquid asset value (how much you value some amount of money) should be the same by proportion, that is, a person with a million dollars should value ten thousand dollars just as much as someone with just ten dollars values a single penny.
Finally, Lorxus wanted to improve their local social circles by combining two ideas: that of a gift economy, and that of the velocity of a dollar. While a full explanation of either concept is beyond the scope of this FAQ, suffice it to say that value is not traded but generated by trade, so that the more trades are made in a given society, the better that society likely is, and a physical object keeping track of a good turn done seems likely to accelerate gift-economic transactions. Work, value, and scarcity are changing, and the Lorxus Favor is a hobbyist experiment in macroeconomics - an attempt to explore what one possible future - a relatively pleasant one - might look like. A possible additional factor might include a move away from the white market's reliance on exploitation of low-level Maslow needs towards an exploitation of mid-level Maslow needs.
WHAT IS IT WORTH?/USE AND ETIQUETTE
Lorxus Favors are not intended to be bought or sold, and ideally should not be held on to, but rather passed on as a means of encouraging faith in, and increasing the velocity of, the above mentioned gift economy. They have only the value that you assign to them and are primarily meant as a means of accelerating (and formalizing) Lorxus's socio-local gift economy.
it is customary to begin an interaction in which you intend to use a favor by include something along the lines of "could you (be convinced to) do me a favor" in what you say to your conversational partner.
A chunk of value comparable to a Lorxus Favor should be something significant, directly beneficial, and meaningfully inconveniencing. Ideally, these should also be something intangible, or else immediately used up, and in any case not storable. A few examples:
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Several hours' worth of non-profiting labor, such as the repair of a device, or help in moving house
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A few days of pet-sitting, or a week of house-sitting or plant-watering
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Several significant sessions of tutoring in a subject, more casual tutoring over the course of a semester, or a single long discussion on a specialty or expert topic
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Several shared dinners unpaid for in money
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Significant driving (3+ hours total)
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A night of drinks out, or, where legal, an eighth-ounce of cannabis, or several smoke sessions
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Very good specialty food - think a six-pack of homebrewed beer, or very good homemade baked goods made by someone renowned in your community for baking
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In general, something that you value more than the sort of help or benefit that you might be expected to reward with dinner, but less than something you could reasonably expect to be refused help with even by a friend
Please note that it would be inappropriate to give a Favor for any or all of these if the favor-giver is not inconvenienced significantly: this is meant to be something exchanged for going out of one's way or sticking one's neck out. Furthermore, it is broadly discouraged to exchange more than one Favor for a given act, unless that act is truly massive. Proper etiquette would also require that a Favor not be given as payment beforehand, but rather as thanks afterwards. Remember - the purpose is the recognition of a social debt to be repaid, or paid on, at a later date, not to wrap up or encapsulate a given interaction as neat, commercial, or easily severed.
It is not advised to attempt to demand that people not in fairly close social contact with Lorxus accept Lorxus Favors. Lorxus takes no responsibility for any illegal actions exchanged for a Favor.
Importantly, use cases that are STRONGLY discouraged include, most prominently, wage-payment, formalized sale, tax payment, and other commercial transactions. Given that the Lorxus Favor is meant to be an experiment in post-scarcity exchange and the acceleration of a gift economy, attempted overly strong coupling to the prevailing market economy is against nearly every guiding principle of the concept. It should also go without saying that theft and counterfeiting are generally forbidden. It is also not recommended to treat Favor coins as collectibles - remember, the idea is to keep the gift moving. These aren't savings, they're counterweights in a gift economy.
On a more pleasant note, it is recommended that the receiver of a Favor politely ask the giver how they came by it, out of curiosity and a desire to link narrative, history, and social belonging to an exchange.
REDEEMABLE VALUE
At any time, you may exchange it directly with Lorxus for 1/1000 of their liquid holdings (roughly 30 USD at time of FAQ writing, go to lorx.us/favorvalue for a more granular price index) plus the worth of a quarter-ounce of silver, although this is not intended to be a measure of their worth; rather, they are exchangeable in this way to provide a useful floor value, and to remain in compliance with applicable counterfeiting law. In order to do this, contact Lorxus at (EMAIL ADDY), send it to them at (POST ADDY), and provide a means of getting you money; you will be responsible for paying all postage, and you assume all risk of postal error. Alternatively, you may sell it to Lorxus for the same price in person. It should be emphasized that the intangible or non-monetary worth of a Lorxus Favor is likely much greater than its cash-backed value.
Further, if you consider a Favor coin to have sufficiently damaged to be worth removing from circulation and still have at least 2/3 of it, you may exchange it directly with Lorxus for a newly minted one.
LEGALITY
Under US counterfeiting law, it is illegal to mint coins of metal intended for use as current money and that are not exchangeable for the US Dollar. As such, in order to be in legal compliance, not to mention good usage etiquette, wages may not be paid in Lorxus Favors, nor commercial products bought, and as noted in the previous section, they may at any time be exchanged for the US Dollar at a public rate.
In the event that currency and financial instruments are to be declared, Lorxus recommends that you count the value of a Favor at its floor exchange rate in USD.
WHAT ARE YOU EVEN GOOD AT?
Lorxus is willing and able to provide a variety of helpful services in exchange for Favors, including but certainly not limited to tutoring in any area of mathematics and most sciences, proof analysis, award-winning copy-editing, helping move house (if local), plant-sitting (if local), basic teaching and conversation in several languages, basic 3D printing advice, standardized test preparation, introductions made to medical professionals possibly willing to do informal pro-bono checkups, and SDK-level teaching games of Go.
If you think about it, there are probably things that are your specialty, too, worth trading Favors for! Long live Ricardo's Law of Comparative Advantage.
WHAT DOES THAT TEXT MEAN?
"千分의一" on the obverse means "1/1000", and is written in a deliberately archaicized mixed Sino-Korean script, much as modern Japanese is written.
"ad perfectam / non per vim // sed per scientiam // et crescentem" on the reverse means "towards perfection not through force but through knowledge and growth".
A HOBBYIST EXPERIMENT IN MACROECONOMICS
In an age when so many "social experiments" are just people less clever than they think pulling poorly conceived and inconsiderate pranks on the unsuspecting, Lorxus feels very much justified in calling this "a hobbiyst experiment in macroeconomics" for three major reasons and a minor reason.
First, the concept is backed up by existing economic theory, namely that of the gift economy, the velocity of a dollar, and social exchange theory, as described above.
Second, Lorxus has a hypothesis: that the creation of friendly, market-shaped handholds on a gift economy which act as illusory second goods in a gift exchange will allow the people who participate in this experimental economy - who have grown up and lived almost their whole lives in a market economy - to feel more empowered both to request and to be willing to perform kind and helpful behaviors for those socially nearby to them, and to share or pass on goods that might otherwise go wasted.
Finally, Lorxus has a control group, that being everyone else; subject consent is also respected in that no one is forced to join or remain in the economy, and hopefully sought out.
It certainly doesn't hurt that if this goes well, everyone around Lorxus benefits; if it goes badly, Lorxus suffers all the costs, and the only person required to do anything particularly inconvenient in this is Lorxus themself, that being to be willing to buy back.