for 1600 wén to 1700 wén. This imbalance further resulted in permanent changes in the prices of goods and services relative to the other metal. The money stock was also affected as the amount of silver coinages in circulation kept increasing, while the stock of copper-alloy cash coins was surely decreasing, leading to even greater deflation in copper-based markets. As a result, the mints operated by the government of the Qing dynasty saw less motivation to produce more copper-alloy cash coins as they were now more expensive to make, as it now cost more silver to import sufficient amounts of copper for their production. The imperial government would continue to try to maintain the official exchange rate between copper-alloy cash coins and silver, but this only made copper-alloy cash coins into an "undervalued currency" and further discouraged it from circulating as people would hoard the coins driving them out of the market, further increasing their relative scarcity to silver (as is described by Gresham's law). This severely negatively affected the economy of rural areas where copper-alloy cash coins circulated as the principal (if not only) currency and was used in high frequency for the daily transactions of most (if not all) people in these regions. It has always been a challenge for the imperial Chinese government to debase the copper coinage to make its production more adorable. This was because debased coinages will be discounted on the market and always invite widespread counterfeiting. The solution to this problem was by introducing new machine-struck coinages that were produced by steam powered machines, this would make it more difficult for counterfeiters to produce fake coinages as the initial costs to purchase the machines needed for counterfeiting were very high and discouraged many would-be counterfeiters. The new technology allowed the Qing government to cast high-quality, standardised coins with machined edges. Therefore the new technology provided a for the government of the Qing dynasty a way to mint sufficient token coins at an affordable cost without inviting forgers to debase the new coinages even further. While the new technology allowed the Qing government to mint sufficient amounts of copper-alloy coins at an affordable cost, the new technology wasn't implemented throughout China at the same time as some provinces would adopt the technology later. Initially the new machine-struck coinages were well received where they were introduced, which helped other provincial mints adopt the new technology