Maur Posted October 15, 2007 Report Share Posted October 15, 2007 Re: Currency . . . of the Future! He's seeing difficulties where none exist. Sure, the Apollo-era ships were basically made of thick metal foil - the shuttles certainly aren't. And electronic chips aren't that affected by radiation, either. Provided you don't stick them near an EMP generator, they'll be fine. Information on most credit/debit cards is not in a chip, but in that black strip of magnetic surface that sits on the back of the card. It is that strip that you are passing by a reader when you slide it through at a checkout. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wyrm Ouroboros Posted October 16, 2007 Report Share Posted October 16, 2007 Re: Currency . . . of the Future! There's basically nothing in this that makes any sense. Our current money is made of paper - if you can make money out of paper' date=' you can certainly make it out of rubber. Or patterns of electrons, which is almost certainly going to be the medium used by the time we are going into space in any numbers. Heck, it's the most used form of currency today...[/quote'] I'd adore debating this, but the 'currency of the future' -- at least, the future that I'm thinking of, I suppose -- is going to be 'what's valuable'. I'm not refuting your points, because everything you're stating is effectively true -- within a certain system. I'm just saying that 'in the future', there's going to be a whole host of variable systems, depending on who you're talking to, where you're talking about, etc. etc. et flippin' cetera. 'Republic Credits aren't good here.' So much for your electronic deposit, eh? A barter economy is, theoretically, the 'safest' economy; you and I agree on what's valuable between us and exchange it, your cow for my 15 bushels of grain or whatever. Money is invented by governments for taxes, by merchants for a reliable 'baseline value'. It's usually -- originally -- based off something that everyone wants; on this planet, it was gold, or silver, or sparklies of one sort or another. Aluminum was fantastically valuable before they figured out a cheap and easy way of extracting it from its ore. You got a time machine and want to be fantastically rich? Take a pickup load of aluminum blocks back to the 1700s. In any case. Money is whatever is agreed upon to be 'of base value' in a society. Sometimes it's rubber. Sometimes it's boar's tusks. Sometimes it's huge immovable stone disks. Sometimes it's theoretical. If the species expands beyond this solar system, though ... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zeropoint Posted October 17, 2007 Report Share Posted October 17, 2007 Re: Currency . . . of the Future! In the Battletech universe, a common unit of currency was the C-Bill, redeemable for a certain amount of data transmission on Comstar's FTL communications network. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Markdoc Posted October 17, 2007 Report Share Posted October 17, 2007 Re: Currency . . . of the Future! I'd adore debating this' date=' but the 'currency of the future' -- at least, the future that [i']I'm[/i] thinking of, I suppose -- is going to be 'what's valuable'. I'm not refuting your points, because everything you're stating is effectively true -- within a certain system. I'm just saying that 'in the future', there's going to be a whole host of variable systems, depending on who you're talking to, where you're talking about, etc. etc. et flippin' cetera. 'Republic Credits aren't good here.' So much for your electronic deposit, eh? That's true - any currency was only valuable within an area where people agreed it was valuable. And what's valuable is going to vary wildly from area to area. That applies to barter too. Here in Copenhagen, if you paid book value for a box of macrolide antibiotics, it'd cost you about 50 bucks. But if you had such a box, you couldn't exchange it for *anything* - not even an icecream - even though it has a defined cost and is perceived to be "valuable". Take it to a market in Africa and you could easily swap it for something in a similar price range to the cost here. Likewise, a cow that you could easily barter in the same market in Africa would fetch you precisely nothing in southern India - though the drugs would still be good. US dollars, however, which have no intrinsic value at all, you could probably barter in any of those three places - though they'd have less value than in the US. That was the whole point of my prior post - there really is no such thing as "intrinsically valuable" - only agreed value. And if you have a whole lot of people who can agree to a value for something - voila! You have a currency. The only real requirement is that it is something that cannot be easily falsified or collected. Edit: it occurred to me that it might not be obvious why I chose antibiotics as my barter item - it's because in postwar Europe, when antibiotics were new and rare, they served as an unofficial black market currency, with table pricing and even exchange rates between the different occupied zones in Germany/Austria. cheers, Mark Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Maur Posted October 17, 2007 Report Share Posted October 17, 2007 Re: Currency . . . of the Future! POWs setup a currency of cigarettes. IIRC this was because under the barter system, someone good at bartering could end the day with 2 or more complete Red Cross relief packages which means someone was out a package. Of course even with this system they had to deal with counterfeiting. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Enforcer84 Posted October 18, 2007 Report Share Posted October 18, 2007 Re: Currency . . . of the Future! Amusingly Appropriate. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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