Major Theory!

[Belandrius Ohhmar He/Him]

I have a Theory that Spikes will become currency in the Cosmere It will kinda be like Canticle where the old people with Investiture powers will Spike themselfs and give the spikes to their children or grandchildren to sell most likely to to use. who do you think this would affect Interplanet relations and same planet relations. Horribly? or for the better?

[MrHobbes343]

While they might be a highly valued commodity...The spikes wouldn't work well as currency.

 

A: They need to be immersed in living blood or flesh to stop losing power.

B: They are extremely hard to create and very morally dubious. This will likely lead to a lot of people not excepting them or dealing with people who have them.

And C : They are of different power levels due to decay and can't be standardized easily due to "soul-stuff".

 

So while they will always be valuable to those with flexible enough morals to use them, the restrictions on the supply and standardization will likely make them unusable as currency.

 

After thought:

How do you value them? Recency of creation? Power type contained? (I'm not going to pay as much for Copper-Cloud powers as I would for Steel-Pushing)  

[Belandrius Ohhmar He/Him]

Ya I guess so, maybe people will have like slaves or something in which they store their spikes, also I believe in the lost Metal they discovered you could spike a person without killing them and people can do some crazy things I think excepting them would be easy. yes diffrent levels of power maybe people would write a summary of the power of the spike and like power level of the person using it. I would pay more for diffrent things but any form (theory) of investiture can be spiked so diffrent peoples would value diffrent things.

[MrHobbes343]

28 minutes ago, Bel Oh said:

"Ya I guess so, maybe people will have like slaves or something in which they store their spikes..."

That's...

A: Monstrous

and B: Likely to kick off a slave rebellion, except that the slaves have super-powers.

 

I think your a bit too married to the idea that the Evil Murder Spikes that contain Bits of the Souls of Other People could act as a currency.

The closest you get is probably the Malwish medallions and those are also less useful as currency then as commodity.

 

To have a currency it must ideally be produce-able in volume and if its a "hard" currency or specie then it need's to be standardized for ease of transactions.

You can't really break a spike to make change or pull one out to act as collateral for a loan without reducing its value.

I think instead of saying currency you might be able to say that they act as valuable commodities, but would fail as a currency.

[Jult]

55 minutes ago, MrHobbes343 said:

The closest you get is probably the Malwish medallions and those are also less useful as currency then as commodity.

Breaths might be a bit closer. People on Nalthis exchange Breaths for money all the time. 

56 minutes ago, MrHobbes343 said:

That's...

A: Monstrous

and B: Likely to kick off a slave rebellion, except that the slaves have super-powers.

Speaking of Nalthis...

I don't think there are currently any examples of it, but I'm curious about how a Spike would interact with one of the Lifeless from Nalthis. There's a very old WoB that makes it sound like it could work in certain situations:

Quote

Wyrmhero (paraphrased)

Can you Hemalurgically spike a dead thing, similar to how Breath goes into dead things? Could you spike a Lifeless?

Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

Yes, if there was enough of the soul left for the spike to take.

London signing (Aug. 4, 2014)

Do they exist in an 'alive-enough' state to keep the Spikes from rapidly deteriorating? Ichor-alcohol seems to stave off the deterioration of Breaths. Maybe it would work similarly with Spikes? Warbreaker's epilogue does mention the creation of an even more potent ichor-alcohol.

AND there's a lower risk of a super-powered slave rebellion when the slaves are obedient zombies (speaking of monstrous).

Maybe the future isn't trading spikes, but trading Spike-powered soldiers.

[ParaTulip fae/faer (declines as she/her)]

Spikes make for a really bad currency since they aren't fungible or easy to assay. How does someone test how much investiture is in the pile of five spikes they just got for a boat or whatever? It's a mess.

1 hour ago, Jult said:

AND there's a lower risk of a super-powered slave rebellion when the slaves are obedient zombies (speaking of monstrous).

I recently watched some videos talking about the Marathon games by Bungie, and zombie super soldiers being bossed around by god-like intelligences seems to go... well it gets weird.

I also feel like the tendency of piles of investiture to become sapient would mean that slave revolts are still liable to happen if there are too many spikes in a given Lifeless. This is especially likely to become a problem in a combat situation, since either the Lifeless will be slavaging spikes from each other in battle or letting those spikes in the destroyed Lifeless lose their charge.

 

[Belandrius Ohhmar He/Him]

unless they broke the slaves like they did in Scadrial I believe for the people in the pits they don't have any feeling like they can revolt, storing spikes in lifeless is an interesting and viable Idea and I think that is what most would do.

[MrHobbes343]

20 hours ago, Bel Oh said:

unless they broke the slaves like they did in Scadrial I believe for the people in the pits they don't have any feeling like they can revolt...

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Kelsier says hello, case in point.

The second the Kandra thought they could, they screwed the lord ruler and swapped sides. While the Koloss were meat puppets for Soothers or Rioters that just meant that after you knew there vulnerability, both sides could control them. The Terris People were planning secretly to revolt at the first opportunity.

Super powered slave rebellion could reasonably serve as a subtitle for the first Mistborne book.

 

Like dude, why are you trying to push an idea thats frankly psycho, "In the future we will trade harvested soul spikes, embedded in slaves as currency". Like read your posts in this thread and tell me that you sound sane and well adjusted with this as your pet topic...

 

Edit: Grammar

Edited April 25, 2025 by MrHobbes343
Grammar

[Belandrius Ohhmar He/Him]

This is my dad's theory he just refuses to get on the shard I'm saying what he told me about his theory

[SpartanBrigade He/Him]

On 4/24/2025 at 8:49 AM, Bel Oh said:

I have a Theory that Spikes will become currency in the Cosmere It will kinda be like Canticle where the old people with Investiture powers will Spike themselfs and give the spikes to their children or grandchildren to sell most likely to to use. who do you think this would affect Interplanet relations and same planet relations. Horribly? or for the better?

Most likely no. Spikes would be a very unsustainable resource for the reasons @MrHobbes343 listed above. Additionally considering most people in the Cosmere look down on Breath trading for moral reasons, I can't imagine how they would react to Hemalurgy trading.

22 hours ago, Jult said:

Breaths might be a bit closer. People on Nalthis exchange Breaths for money all the time. 

Speaking of Nalthis...

I don't think there are currently any examples of it, but I'm curious about how a Spike would interact with one of the Lifeless from Nalthis. There's a very old WoB that makes it sound like it could work in certain situations:

Do they exist in an 'alive-enough' state to keep the Spikes from rapidly deteriorating? Ichor-alcohol seems to stave off the deterioration of Breaths. Maybe it would work similarly with Spikes? Warbreaker's epilogue does mention the creation of an even more potent ichor-alcohol.

AND there's a lower risk of a super-powered slave rebellion when the slaves are obedient zombies (speaking of monstrous).

Maybe the future isn't trading spikes, but trading Spike-powered soldiers.

This also sounds morally dubious. Isn't this like a slave trade but even more twisted in a way?

[Jult]

1 hour ago, SpartanBrigade said:

This also sounds morally dubious. Isn't this like a slave trade but even more twisted in a way?

Oh for sure. It's taking the least moral aspects of the Scadrian and Nalthian systems and merging them. I think the majority of the Cosmere would frown on it just as they frown on Hemalurgy and Lifeless already. If anyone is doing this, it would be future villains. I'm just saying that it sounds mechanically possible from what we know about these methods of Investiture. 

[ParaTulip fae/faer (declines as she/her)]

1 hour ago, Jult said:

If anyone is doing this, it would be future villains. I'm just saying that it sounds mechanically possible from what we know about these methods of Investiture. 

Now, that's unrealistic. What's more likely to happen is that these horrible things which destroy all sense of what is life and what is death are made the foundations of the economic order and, while a lot of people point out that this is pretty atrocious and should be stopped, too many people depend on the status quo for easy access to commodities and also a lot of infrastructure will be based on them.

Seriously, IRL we gave lots of people various amounts of lead poisoning so cars would run better. Human societies that adopt capitalist logics, which everywhere in the Comsere is heading towards, eg the state is creating the notion of intellectual property on Roshar, Scandrial is just done with the 19th century basically, and Nalthius has a fairly dominant system of people selling chunks of their souls for money, tend to be pretty bad about adopting horrifically dangerous technologies as the basic stuff of life.

A spiked up lifeless might fly into a horrible rage due to realizing the sheer agony of its existence as a spiritual pin cushion and kill someone every so often, might even do it on the order of thirty thousand times a year in a given USA-sized country, but that would still not make them any more implausible to keep around than the car. 

But yeah, we don't use cars as units of economic trade. They are too big and have too many particular attributes for that.

[MrHobbes343]

26 minutes ago, ParaTulip said:

But yeah, we don't use cars as units of economic trade. They are too big and have too many particular attributes for that.

I think this is the main barrier to this threads premise.

How do you buy bread? Currency is useless if it's too big to buy any normal good, especially if it can't be divided into useful denominations.

One only has to look to Nalthis to see the Mundane Horror of the trading of pieces of souls, but there are not enough metal-born to make enough spikes to have a denomination small enough to trade for normal goods. (Not to mention that many of said metal-born would be able to fight back if you tried to spike them, and even old and dying metal-born might very well choose not to go gently into that good night on the end of a spike.)

Edited April 25, 2025 by MrHobbes343
A word