A gold dragon is worth over $17,000 USD? That does not seem right.

[BericDondarrion]

On the wiki page for currency in Westeros, it says that a gold dragon is equivalent to over $17,000 or over £11,000 a piece. That is definitely not right. They equated that to something LF said on the show but that is insanely overpriced. That means the Hounds tourney of the hand purse was worth over $600,000,000. No way is that accurate. Edmure offered 1000 dragons to anyone who captured Jaime, which is the equivalent to 17 million dollars.

I remember reading somewhere that GRRM himself said that the currency in ASOIAF isn't meant to be accurate when used in comparison and that's for sure.

I would guess that Sandors 40k winnings would be the equivalent of probably $50-100 grand today and even that might be high. I kind of wish GRRM had made the value of money in Westeros concrete and accurate to todays market, as in a room at an inn to cost $50 USD a night, so say that is 10 silvers.

Something like

1 gold dragon - $100

1 silver - $5

1 copper - $.25

For a world that he has made so incredibly detailed and vivid that you can imagine it in your head I really wish he made money in the series detailed so we know the general cost of goods and services in today's market.

[Ziggy Targdust]

I think Sandors tourney winnings should equate to millions at least. That was like winning the Super Bowl, the money should be similar to pro athlete money.

[Twenty of House Goodmen]

That would mean Anguy won $170,000,000 winning that archery contest.

[BericDondarrion]

That would mean Anguy won $170,000,000 winning that archery contest.

And Anguy remarked that he blew all his winning in a month or two on whores and wine... That better be some great wine and pristine whores! Especially when Rosey in Oldtowns maidenhead only costs a single dragon for Pate.

[Obsidious]

I was thinking that a Golden Dragon was around $1,000, and a silver being extravagantly less in valve, maybe like $20, and a copper $1.

We know with Pate and Rose (or Rosey, can't really remember) in the prologue of AFFC that a dragon is an absurd amount of money for a night with a whore, even for a maid, and silvers are common by the bundle.

[The Abominable SnowOther]

:eek:

[Minstral]

Wasn't there something about GRRM messing up with the tournament winnings that the Hound and Anguy received?

[Kienn]

They're just numbers...

Right now 1 Bahrani Dinar is worth almost 3000 South Korean Won.

1 Dollar is worth like 500000000 Zimbabwe whatevers

Who cares

[Obebb]

Wow, I suddenly feel really sorry for the Hound getting his money taken from him

[SerArthurHeath]

Just going to say GRRM got his figures wrong. A Dragon is clearly far more than a silver in the books, and silvers are quite a bit anyway because they can buy meals and rooms at inns with a couple, and horses with silver and no gold. If a Dragon is pure gold, assuming it is roughly as precious in Westeros as in Europe, that's $60+ US dollars today and a gold coin would weigh 6-8g, so at an estimate each Dragon should be $350-500 US. 40k Dragons is a ridiculous amount

[SerArthurHeath]

Except if the currency is made with actual gold, known to be precious in Westeros, as it is implied, it's not just numbers. The value of Gold is pretty constant, it's the amount in coins that has changed, seeing a huge depreciation in teh value of every currency compared to 200 odd years ago because now all currency only has a false representative value not material value and all the money we use is imaginary.

[JonCon's Red Beard]

I'm not shocked at the value of the gold dragons but the fact that Anguy spent that much in wines and whores. No wonder Robert broke the Kingdom.

[SerArthurHeath]

With only 2 wine producing regions, I can understand ho wit might be costly

[Mikkel]

Yeah the value of money is one of those things that haven't been done with enough attention to detail to make sense. All you can use it for is getting a vague idea of whether something is a lot of money or not. Trying to accurately calculate what the economy is like or equate it to real-world terms isn't going to work - it's not even consistent in-world.

[danm_999]

No, a gold dragon is not worth $17,000 USD.

It's just wrong. We don't know real world values for Westerosi currency.

Just going to say GRRM got his figures wrong.

Not at all. Martin has never attempted to define a gold dragon in real world terms. Holding Martin to account for the Wiki's data is unfair. Anybody can edit it. It's non canon at all.

I mean seriously, look at how the wiki arrives at its conclusion that a dragon equals $17,000 USD.

A single Gold Dragon converts to about 13,000 Euros, 17,222 US Dollars, or 11,111 Pounds Sterling. This calculation is based on a remark made by Petyr Baelish during the Tourney of the Hand in the episode The Wolf and the Lion, where he quips that he could buy a dozen barrels of expensive Dornish wine with 100 Gold Dragons. By averaging the prices of fine wine in the real world, and assuming that Westeros uses the standard 225 liter wine barrel, this exchange rate is calculated.

I mean, where the hell do we even begin with this shit;

1) The sole piece of evidence used to make the currency calculation is a remark Littlefinger makes in the TV show, and not in the book. And it's not an episode written by Martin either. It's basically as canon as the non-existence of Willas Tyrell in the show.

2) It assumes the Westerosi use 225 Litre standard barrels we do on Earth, which is really lolworthy, as they don't even have the metric system in Westeros.

3) It "averages" the price of "fine wine" in the real world. I mean, what the fuck does that even mean? The price of wine differs "in the real world" vastly from country to country. Where in the real world are we talking about?

4) What types of wine is it averaging? How many are there? Red wine? White wine? There's no calculations here whatsoever.

5) The price of wine, like any other commodity, fluctuates constantly. But there's absolutely no information about when this calculation was made, so even assuming all the above are somehow not problems, the figure for a gold dragon might be well above and below the $17, 000 figure. Hell, you can tell it's way out of date by the simple fact it thinks $17,222 USD converts to 13,000 Euros (which is wrong, currently as of May 4th 2014 17,222 USD is about 12,400 Euros).

So yeah, just ignore it. It's some fan editing the Wiki. Got nothing to do with Martin.

[SerArthurHeath]

No, I meant that with an approximate value for the gold in a Dragon, which admittedly assumes it's mostly pure gold as some coins used in real life were, 40k dragons is a huge prize. Not as ridiculous as the Wiki's value, which I agree was reached with heavily flawed logic, but still several million dollars

[Ziggy Targdust]

Does anybody know anything about how much money real knights won in real tournaments??

Now that I think of it, athletes being wealthy is a fairly new thing of the last 30 years or so.

[danm_999]

No, I meant that with an approximate value for the gold in a Dragon, which admittedly assumes it's mostly pure gold as some coins used in real life were, 40k dragons is a huge prize. Not as ridiculous as the Wiki's value, which I agree was reached with heavily flawed logic, but still several million dollars

Hell, we don't even know if gold is the same element in Westeros as it is in the real world. The fact Drogo is able to boil it in a cooking pot before he 'crowns' Viserys suggests that it isn't.

Also sorry if you felt that rant was targetted at you (it wasn't), it was at the Wiki.

[Bennis of the Brown Shield]

17 000 sounds like too much, but it's not really in the wrong ballpark if trying to do a comparison with real world money (which is hard anyway since we are dealing with completely different economies).

In the Hedge Knight ser Duncan thinks that he'll be able to live for an entire year on about 3,5 gold dragons, and that's including fodder for two horses plus that Duncan himself is a really big guy so he probably eats a lot.

Sandor and Anguy's price winnings are seriously messed up, but GRRM wrote those parts pretty early on in the series.

[ambi76]

A 100$ seems too low but 17 000$ is a bit random.

I've always gone with:

1 golddragon = 1000$

1 silverstag = 100$

1 copper =10$

A silver is considered overpaying for a whore (the normal price seems a few coppers) and that the mom of Pate's crush wants 1 gold is pretty outrageous but she justifies this with the virginity of her daughter.

From the show but:

First place and second place in royal tourney: 50 000 gd = 50 000 000$ & 10 000 gd = 10 000 000$ (that's a bit much I guess)

100 golddragons on the Mountain = 100 000$ bet

6 000 000 golddragons crown debts = 6 000 000 000$ crown debts