How to justify salt as currency?

I can't dig out a source on it right now, but my prof once told me that salt was literally issued as part of a soldier's pay in the field in the eighteenth century (and possibly before or after, will check) specifically for this reason -- because it was more valuable to be able to make your food last longer than it is to have money where you don't really have anywhere to spend it.

If your setting has a food shortage for whatever reason this would only make salt even more valuable, but if your characters are working within a specific framework, like that of a campaigning army, then the value of salt is obvious.

That and it's an important nutrient (easy to forget in our modern society where too much salt in the diet is more the concern), and it's just generally tasty. Plus it's only obtainable in large quantities in certain areas; if you're not by the sea and don't have rock salt deposits available to mine, you'll need to import it.

TL;DR -- steady, high demand, and limited supply. The perfect recipe for a valuable commodity that will serve well as a form of currency.

Yeah I got beaten by guys bringing up the Roman example, but GG.

Does drying sea water work or is there some catch?

no they werent, thats a myth

Your characters are Legionaires.

early bronze age society where the very idea of currency is a new one and the area they're in is poor in metals but wealthy in salt

its not real currency per se, more pseudo-bartering but salt is common, has a relatively stable "value" and doesn't spoil so people have taken to measuring the worth of an object in salt.

it works, but if you are a thousand miles from the ocean, you can't really do that now can you?

>Does drying sea water work or is there some catch?

Short answer: Yes.

You let sea water evaporate and it'll leave behind a dust coating of sea salt that can be collected and used; Gandhi let a protest walk to the ocean to get sea salt when the English began taxing salt in colonial India.

People have been getting salt from seawater since ancient times, right up until the present day. Have you never heard of sea salt used in cooking?

Ye, where do you think the phrase "worth his salt" comes from OP?

>is there some catch?
I mean, no, not really. Sea water is roughly 5% salt, so you would need to boil a shit load of water to get a large amount of salt out of it. this of course would require you to spend a lot of energy collecting, heating, and filtering said water.

There is no catch, but it is time consuming, inefficient work. Even in a setting where salt is used as currency, i would think that most civilizations would rather mine for halite than boil seawater. Unless you had a "free" way of generating the heat required or collecting the water, I doubt it would be worthwhile overall.

there's no "catch" so salt
its a very simple molecule, its not like its something organic that can spoil, have a poisonous variant or something like that

its also why all the so called "healthy salts" are complete and utter bullshit

sea water generally isn't boiled to extract salt, its allowed to flow into large shallow pools which are blocked off and allowed to evaporate as the tides recede, then the salt is gathered and they're reopened as the tides rise

sure you need a shitload of water, but its doable

...So you just get a trough of seawater and let it sit in the sun. Repeat.

Sea salt is typically collected by sun drying. You collect brine in shallow pools and just let them evaporate off. Using fuel to boil the water off is generally only done in areas with less sunny climate but a plentiful supply of cheap fuel, such as around the peat bogs in England.

Currencies should be durable, divisible, convenient to handle, and have consistent quality. So as long as the containers are air tight or there's low humidity, there's no reason to switch to other currencies.
Of course it is needed to live, and cheep lab produced salt is modern, so it is a valuable trade good.
A state may start to issue standard salt because it controls the coasts. It may also want to encourage salt production beyond the need of the upper classes, so it orders that all salaries be payed in salt.

and even then it would in most cases be preferable to just use the extensive salt trading networks to get it

that makes sense, sun drying definitely solves the heat problem. I would think that if salt really were currency though you would want to find a method faster than relying on the sun to collect as much salt as possible. after all, if every other kingdom is doing it, how would you gain an economic advantage on them?

I am really starting to like the implications of a salt based currency.

>after all, if every other kingdom is doing it, how would you gain an economic advantage on them?
By producing shit other than salt and trading, duh.

What, you think every country that didn't have plentiful gold and/or silver deposits was shit out of luck economically in the days of precious metal coinage? Being able to make plenty of the base material for the predominant currency is nice, but hardly necessary if you can produce other stuff of value.

For sake of argument, if we assumed that in OP's setting the rock salts deposits are uncommon or inaccessible and weather is not tropical-level of sunny, it starts coming together nicely.

>I would think that if salt really were currency though you would want to find a method faster than relying on the sun to collect as much salt as possible. after all, if every other kingdom is doing it, how would you gain an economic advantage on them?
Think of it like natural bitcoins.

>how would you gain an economic advantage on them?

By either having other resources that are worth salt: livestock, crops, metals, monsters, skilled labor, etc.. Or you could CAPTURE their salt beaches or otherwise blockade/make it more difficult for them to move the salt around without your "expensive cooperation".

You don't even need that, salt was a valuable trade commodity IRL for much of history.

The main issue to address is not "why is salt valuable", but rather "why salt rather than precious metals". This could be simply a cultural thing (eg, a world where people place more value on commodities like salt with practical uses rather than precious metals which are mainly of ornamental value), or perhaps precious metals are too rare for widespread use in coinage.

The disuse of coinage could even be a more localized factor, like how several cultures were known to use rare shells as currency rather than virtually inaccessible metals.

Say salt currency cities are on one end of a massive trading network where large amounts of salt are produced and metals are poorer, but the further downstream you go the more traditional metal coins are used.
And heck if you go down a branch of the trade route you may end up in an area that uses something else entirely like volcanic glass, or like I said shells or even massive round stones the size of a man (not fantasy btw).

The entire world using a semi-compatible system of currency is an incredibly recent development as far as human culture is concerned and even then we have the bitcoin which uses computing power as currency (essentially)

If you're making a fantasy world it could even add some spice to think of what a certain culture would use as currency.

How to justify? Very, very easily.

-In local economics, you can have slips of paper to represent salt deposits, or salt held in a central salt storage. I think there were ancient kingdoms that did something similar for grain, paper currency is actually really, really old.

-The use of salt as a trade item is pretty old, way back in the day Ghana used to trade salt for its weight in gold if I recall right.

-There's nothing magical about precious metals that make them ideal for currency, people mostly used whatever was around. The Ancient Greeks' domestically-made coinage was silver, because silver was what they could mine there. The Romans used bronze for a really long time and only really introduced other metals into their coinage during the Punic Wars.

>If you're making a fantasy world it could even add some spice to think of what a certain culture would use as currency.
Such as, for instance, spice.

...I'll just show myself out.

Salt literally was currency for a while.
It's very valuable for it's weight. Preserving food is very, very useful.

IIRC the earliest known cities on the european continent/peninsula were situated around salt deposits

>You don't even need that, salt was a valuable trade commodity IRL for much of history.

This. There were powerful cities whose wealth came from having a salt mine. Stuff was super valuable for a long time in human history.

Just like real life, before the advent of machines the salt mines were quite dangerous, most deposits were inaccessible and weren't economically advantageous, and we are talking about slaves or slave-like workers, compared to salt works.

no need, given how dried spices tend to have high value for their weight, don't spoil easily and are common trade goods, having them act as either full on currency or else a bartering standard would be 100% valid

heck it could be interesting if spices were used by say a dwarven society as currency because everyone learns how to work a forge, precious metals are plentiful and as a direct result its relatively easy to mint your own coins

but spices can only be grown outside the dwarven mountainhomes or in very rare patches on the sides of mountains all directly controlled by the local kings. They're perfect

I was making a pun, dammit!

And I'm forcefully making it a part of the discussion instead

In my setting magic cannot successfully replicate crystalline structures, so the currency are chits of various gemstones.
Salt serves as the lowest form of currency and granulated salt is effectively the "change"

A central salt store note would essentially be a receipt; this currency bears a copy of a record in the salt storage, and is redeemable for an amount up to the amount it's written for. Literally a commodity-based economy with a salt-standard.

Now, here's the real kicker; how do you figure out what a standard "unit" of salt is? Without a set standard for size, what's to stop merchants from fudging the quantity just a little bit lower in times of scarcity? In this case, you need a universal standard, a physical metric by which defines weight, which can be used as a primary source for balancing all the kingdom's scales, thereby ensuring that the kingdom's trade standards are standardized.

France did this in real life, and became a trade center because of it. Length was standardized, weight was standardized, the definition of bolts of cloth and gallons of liquid was standardized so that merchants trading with France would know they were getting exactly what they were paying for in amount.

and what you mention wouldn't be limited just to salt
shaving coins had severe punishments in most societies because of just how often it happened

Don't make a comment that makes sense then.

What do you mean how? It was IRL.

Salt is used for preserving food (as mentioned several times already), is a necessary nutrient for the body, has low-end medicinal properties (apply salt to shallow cuts, stings but works), and is used in religious, ritual, and magical ceremonies. However, since it's useful in so many ways, it's more "practical" than a real currency would be so any trade involving it would be closer to a barter system. The people trading for it are doing so in order to use it, and they are not likely to trade it away unless they're scalping it or something. For that reason, it's better suited as the currency of a small kingdom that doesn't have natural sources. Either the ruler or a powerful merchant could keep control of imported salt to control the population.

That's a commodity-based crime when the commodity itself is part of the currency. If the coinage is just a placeholder for the commodity, then shaving wouldn't occur because the money itself is worthless. Of course, people would probably just forge coins in that case.

Economy is hard. You've got to work it out just right for it to work.

I do like how Destiny does it with Glimmer.

>ITT Kids who should have stayed in school and the kids who did tell them what's what.
I mean you could have just googled it OP, you fucking retard.

Read some history, you dumb, lazy sack of crap.

Salt is subject to massive inflation due to oversupply by /v/irgins.

>I can't dig out a source on it right now,
One of the Pliny's said that during the first century, but he had no evidence and neither does anyone else.

You know I'm in the stages of preparing a campaign that'll have a good amount of economics to it and I'd already played with the idea of at least offering the option to move the setting to something Arabia-esque away from Fantasy Europe once I've assembled the group. I think I'm gonna steal this whole salt economy thing for that aswell if they express interest in the desert setting thing.

What would be good ways to portion salt into conveniently countable and potentially portable currency units/amounts?

I mean you could just google "salt as currency" so you don't look retarded.

You want them to be easily stackable, small enough to carry around, but still worth carrying around for their trade value. Being a mineral, you could have it cut like gems for high-grade stuff and compress the leftover shavings into disks to serve as cheaper coinage.

>how to justify something that happened in ancient societies

Gee I wonder how indeed op.

Is that technologically feasible in your standard medieval fantasy (or oriental fantasy I guess) setting though? Also that's still just kind of 2 denominations, though I guess you could do stuff like press discs, bars, strips and torus or something.

I'm sure you could think of any number of fine, white, valuable powders and see how they're packaged, shipped, carried, or even smuggled. Now imagine if they weren't illegal, and people could carry some on themselves without needing to hide it. Pouches, tiny sealed glass tubes or jars, bricks, etc.

Since it'd be a currency with inherent value instead of representational value, there isn't as much need to indicate its worth on the currency itself. Disc value, being compressed powder, is simply weight. Gem value could be graded by size, purity, and the quality of the cut, much like actual gemstones. If necessary, discs could have their weight value etched onto them and gems could have some other means that wouldn't deface the gem itself, such as number of sides on the flat end (triangular face is 3, square face is 4, etc). Or, just reserve the flat side for value markings and the local seal.

Counterfeiting the discs could be an issue, such as people cutting heavier materials into the mix, so there'd have to be a way to determine purity. Counterfeiting salt gems would be harder, since salt has a very distinct taste and properties.

Actually, disregard literally all of that. Apparently, salt naturally forms into cube-shaped crystals, which is super convenient.

Most informal exchanges probably eyeball it. I mean, who's going to carry around a scale? If you've got what he needs and he has what you need, might as well just trade even if the particulars are a little fuzzy.

More formal trades and dedicated bazaars will probably ot bother counting grains because they can probably make more sales in the time it takes to count it out correctly, so prefer to deal in minted currency or standardized amounts to avoid getting scammed.

Considering how we talked about the value of salt here I imagine that even the smallest disc you could press that isn't so small that it would be constantly lost and thus impractical would have considerable value though, like several gp at least. So what about incredibly small transactions? How does a peasent conduct the miniscule transactions of fractions of gp that make up their life? Surely they won't just pour loose grains from one hand into the other.

Tiny glass phials to hold the salt dust, sealed with wax and stamped with the king's mark?

Seems a bit too advanced for your average bumpkin in his average bumpkin community.

Well, I'd certainly hope the local currency is handled, processed, and controlled by the state. The capital of which is probably in the only oasis for miles, if this is supposed to be a desert setting. Any loose salt would go through the capital to be packaged as currencyr, with the government taking a percentage as tax, of course.

So every random peasant that somehow acquires an amount of salt that isn't packaged, by finding it, boiling it out of water, condensing it out of air or whatever, mining it or through a transaction of any kind would have to send it to the capital to be processed, somehow organizing not only the transport there and back but also payment for that, and the administrative necessities of weighing and tagging it, for even miniscule amounts?

Back during the Gold Rush, people did use gold dust as currency. They'd either sell it to minters at a reduced rate and the minters melted them into bars to sell at full price, or they just traded it amongst themselves before it found its way back to the people who melt it down.

They'd just keep it in bags and sacks and trade amounts of the stuff around, sometimes employing a scale to determine exact or rough quantities, but otherwise just sort of traded the dust around between bags. Salt can do much the same, since as long as both parties have some bags fine enough to hold it, they can trade amounts between them.

I'll admit I'm not a very smart man, but I don't really see another solution.

So, what does a random peasant do when they somehow acquire a chunk of gold, or sift some gold flecks out of a riverbank?

Keep it or resell it, with salt they would just use it.

Upgrade to something better than peasant, because that amount of gold is more than they might make in their entire lifetime.

That's why I'm asking about incredibly miniscule amounts of salt such as they would actually be likely to get their hands on. I don't think it's probably literally the same value as gold gram for gram (at least I probably would make it worth slightly less in the setting) but there isn't a thing going on where you can make 2 coins the same size with one being gold and the other being silver. Two coins made of salt of the same size are going to be worth the same cause its the same amount of salt.

Plus there's the actual usage factor for salt that would make it more likely they wouldn't have completely unscathed minted bits of currency, but actual useable units of ground salt.

You have a setup for a John Steinbeck book. Look up his book, "The Pearl," where some random kid finds a huge pearl and things go south in Steinbeckian fashion. It's one of his shorter novellas.

More realistically:

Forgery is still a crime, even though our paper monies are, by all reasonable standards, worthless.

All this talk of a salt-based economy and no one's posted Tale of an Industrious Rogue yet?

1d4chan.org/wiki/Tale_of_an_Industrious_Rogue,_Part_I

I think we all know it mate.

Maybe read the post before replying?
They're talking about the 18th century, not BC Rome.

>honey in brood comb

always triggers my autism

Unfortunately, salt disintegrates in the rain so it's not very durable.

That being said, you can certainly use salt to back your currency. Just store the actual salt in a safe place and issue vouchers for the salt. Since you can turn the vouchers in for actual salt at any time you can trade them as currency. We basically did the same for gold for a couple centuries before the unbacked currency we use today.

>unbacked
It's backed by plenty of rich fuckers and banks that will readily fight tooth and claw for it to retain its value so they can remain in charge of the world more or less.

The catch is that drying sea water take a long time. I'm talking leaving the sea water out for months to let the water evaporate out. Even if you boil it the process is time consuming.

Care to explain?

I think that's where the babbies go, not the food.

Can confirm from half remembered history class

Technically speaking, having unbacked currency is actually better for an economy since we don't have to worry about somebody finding a new gold vein and suddenly dealing with hyperinflation. Or not having enough gold to pay for everything we're trying to do. Did you know that England nearly ran out of silver before they started selling it to China? They were having trouble with basic economic functions because there wasn't any silver to back their currency. You couldn't take out a loan because nobody had money to lend. You couldn't print more money because there was no silver to back it up.

Really, we don't want to go back to those bad old days. If people are willing to fight to keep our money unbacked then more power to them. Silver and gold weren't even that valuable to begin with.

General small transactions were handled informally. This is true up until the early modern era, actually. Most folks in the middle ages never saw a coin, they paid their taxes in tangible goods, and paid for other things by verbal arrangements, tit-for-tat, and so forth.

If we're talking about a desert setting its likely that there's a good amount of caravaneering going on that supplies more remote settlements with . well, supplies. I guess those communities would just have to get together as a whole more or less to do their trading with the outside suppliers?

Man, with a couple of the players I play with salt is the last thing you can use as a valuable commodity.

If we're talking Babylon, taxes were collected in goods because they were stored in storage structures, and in times of famine would be redistributed back so their people wouldn't starve.

Instead we get to worry about the wonderful ramifications of unregulated capital flows (capital that is available due to negotiable infinitely-government-issued instruments like treasury bonds) causing local hyperinflation.

All biology requires sodium to function. However, the compound is broken down during eukaryotic metabolism.

This means that eating food of any type won't serve as a source of sodium at all.

All organisms need to intake sodium in order to survive, meaning that salt mines are not only profitable to the point of establishing those that control them as merchant kings, but that processed salt is often used in trade and is often a target of theft.

YOU. SEARCH FOR 'THE TALE OF AN INDUSTRIOUS ROGUE.' DO NOT COME BACK UNTIL YOU HAVE READ IT. THANK YOU, HAVE A GODDAMNED NICE DAY.

Fortunately, salt would have a built-in way to fix inflation. Just eat it.

It's as much a product as it is a currency, as its value comes from its necessity.

If we're assuming a desert setting here, what about water in regards ro currency or value?

You don't have to import water in a desert setting, since you don't establish settlements in deserts without ready access to water.
Salt would have to be imported or mined though, which requires either exchanging material wealth for or organized labor.

And 'soldier', and about 20 other words related to military and commerce.

Pic related

Harder to transport, easier to consume. You'd need an aqueduct from a larger source or be stuck to building around springs and rivers.

A thimble of salt is enough seasoning for a day and then some. A thimble of water is death of thirst.

It has historical precedent. Back when shaving the sides of coins made of precious metal big problem there were people(bankers I think, but it's been a while so I can't remember for sure) whose job included weighing out coins and putting them into bags sealed with their mark and the value contained within. Purchases were made without even opening the bags to confirm the coins inside, the seal of a trusted man whose reputation would be on the line if its contents weren't what he said was enough assurance.

And, coincidentally, fresh water rivers.

So basically every community needs access to a notary and smaller ones that might have to share one with others just have the problem of having to wait or having to travel to him I guess? I guess that works.

I'm kinda thinking of maybe taking the idea of about
>Tiny glass phials to hold the salt dust, sealed with wax and stamped with the king's mark?
but making them like a special issue/edict kind of thing, like a special item.

You could call them a "King's Ransom" or something. They're special tokens of which very few exist and circulate around the realm because they are only issued when the ruler at the time is in need of what essentially amounts to a service or favor that is either unrealistic (or impossible) to fully compensate or he wants to leverage his position for. Basically they would act as a sort of piece of super currency in that the bearer could trade them for almost anything they ask in value, from goods to services, and most would gladly take them because they could then do the same in return with someone else, and that's how they circulate around the kingdom, only ever a few having been issued by rulers across the years, passing from powerful people close to the crown into circulation within mercantile circles. They'd still contain salt in the glass vial and everything, though far less in value than anything they're likely used to attain, merely there as a token of (orginally the issuing rulers) acknowledgement and esteem for the service, and of course to give them practical usefulness by having actual salt. (also offers some nice hooks there, either of forcing the choice between destroying the value of one such thing by using the salt in a life/death sorta situation, or coming across one with the seal broken and the salt missing in some sort of transaction or discovery and going from there)