This is a little confusing people will have to sell what to miners? The miners produce the ore to sell to the bank no-one else has currency. Therefor everyone has to be a miner to have currency or perform services for the miners. It seems the miners will be kings and everyone else their peons, unless it is possible to rob the miners in which case the miners will become enslaved... my head is reeling. Why would miners pay for ore when they can just dig it for themselves Why would people sell ore to the miners when they can sell it to the bank for currency?
Perhaps you could clarify for me what you mean. I am obviously missing something.
Hrm... I think you have it even though you don't think you do. You said:
The miners produce the ore to sell to the bank no-one else has currency. Therefor everyone has to be a miner to have currency or perform services for the miners.
And that's correct. Those would be the only two ways to get currency. Now, looking at the second bit:
It seems the miners will be kings and everyone else their peons, unless it is possible to rob the miners in which case the miners will become enslaved....Why would people sell ore to the miners when they can sell it to the bank for currency?
Why, today, do you buy groceries when you could grow food yourself? Why pay someone to make you a house when you could build one yourself? The reason is that not everyone will want to (nor will they be able to) master every trade. It will all end up with some sort of balance: if a player wants ore, she can either learn to mine and get it for herself, or go find a miner that will trade either currency for a service (to get the ore from the bank) or directly trade for the ore outright. It's all about relative cost in terms of effort to get the ore for yourself: if it's easier to get ore for yourself, you'll just do that. If it's easier to trade with a miner, people will do that.
Now, why will people bother with currency at all? The same reason we do today - it's easier to trade currency than it is to find someone who wants to trade what I can do for what I want. After all, farmers aren't really interested in systems engineering, so how could I get food from them without currency? It would be a pain.
As for becoming a slave (either the miners or the non-miners) it's not likely, because there will likely be no mechanism for the miners to prevent the other folks from doing what they want to get ore some other way, and there will be no mechanism for the others to withhold things from the miners. (Unless players can manage to physically prevent others from reaching a mine or learning new skills, and I don't think that is feasible in this universe.)
