What's the superior apocalypse currency?

Don't be silly, you trade wooden chits as handjob vouchers.

Markets can be unstable and mutants with multiple hands have a tendency to cause deflation. The government has started cutting off peoples hands to fight deflation, but it might be a while before we see it's effects on the market.

So what you are saying is, is that all trade is ultimately based upon prostitution, and that brothels act as banks which give out vouchers that can be redeemed for sexual services and these vouchers are used as currency? While people not associated with the brothels can attempt to do direct trade, at some risk of having authority figures come down on them hard for "counterfeiting"

Well it makes more sense than bottle caps I'll give you that.

It's not junk. It's just fiat currency that uses caps instead of bills. It's backed by your faith in the water merchants to turn your caps into bottles of water.

You only have to carry around 10k bottle caps if the currency is valued that low. It obviously doesn't work in a setting with easy access to clean drinking water. But in a desert setting where the already scarce water is likely to be contaminated, they might be work ten times their weight in gold.

>It's just fiat currency that uses caps instead of bills.
Okay, why not use something else that it's actually easy to carry?

Fiat currencies were used to make people lives easier, not harder.

>You only have to carry around 10k bottle caps if the currency is valued that low.
You mean every Fallout game?

Whatever people want. There's not going to be a currency as we know it without a government to standardize it

Something that everyone finds valuable but not inherently useful on its own.

You are proposing barter. But barter will be done away as soon as a first degree of stability is achieved to make the survivors lives easier.

>They might be worth ten times their weight in gold
Not with as how common bottle caps are.

Only if there is a power that can actually back up that new currency.

I also vote bullets, assuming prices are relatively sane.

There could be a lot of such things. The user you replied is right, without an institution it's back to exchanging goods.

>you trade wooden chits as handjob vouchers
This just might be the most batshit insane idea I've ever seen on Veeky Forums.

A government is just whichever group has the military power to enforce its own laws.

As soon as the warlords settle down a bit, they'll most likely legitimise whatever commodity people have already been trading as the de facto currency.

What would people be trading before they came in power? Not a standard currency. The government would have to create it, then convince people that it has a value via the government.

Bottle caps are easy to carry.
>You mean every Fallout game?
I said it was a good idea, not that it was implemented well.
Not particularly hard to control the currency. If the caps are worthless you have guild flunkies collect all the ones in an area, before announcing it as a currency.

You still might be better off just using something else like chits or coins that you can control easier. Caps were a more convenient currency to have lying around a wasteland.

Last post-apocalyptic game I had, the local "democratically elected" warlord used food vouchers. If you don't work, you don't eat.

Gold.
>can't be made
>easy to conceal
>resistant to corrosion
>rare AF

I had this idea that, albeit dumb, kinda tickled me in an interesting way.
>post apocalypse
>some semblance of order returning
>a group has reclaimed and rebuilt a hydroelectric plant/other electricity producing utility
>phones are in circulation again, but instead of using telecommunication towers they work on shortwave ala radios
>currency is literally electricity and controlled by the Electric group
>people gain electricity by trading resources to them for credit which is uploaded to the phone and kept on record
>credit can also be traded for battery packs, to allow portable charging
>through the use of an app, you can transfer credit to one another for use in purchases/sales
>some people have set up alternate methods of power, such as solar and air, and are either self sustaining groups or competing with the major Elec group.

i like the idea of a currency that is also ingrained in day to day use. Something you have to decide between saving for purchases or using for personal comfort. It's pretty dumb I'll admit, but I like it.

The problem with bottle-caps is that there's only one denomination of currency.

Before we had paper money there were all kinds of denominations of coins: If you wanted to buy an apple you paid in coppers or whatever, but if you were an aristo buying a new horse or a new wing for your family mansion, then you'd pay in guineas or gold doubloons or what-not.

Carrying tens of thousands of (insert currency) worth of gold coins is a lot more practical than carrying it in ha'pennies or farthings.

There wouldn't be an accepted currency in a apocalypse as an agreed upon currency needs stability to succeed. The post apocalypse would have coins made of various precious metals made by new governments. Nothing legitimizes leadership like putting your face on currency and having a monopoly on violence.

Before minted coins, people often traded in grain and cattle. There's no reason a post-apocalyptic society couldn't do the same, using basic produce for everyday transactions, and livestock for more expensive deals.

Then along comes Lord GunSkull, sees this system working just fine, and says "okay, this is what we use," and proceeds to build all his laws around the exchange of produce and livestock.

Before a government came to power, there generally isn't a currency, just bartering.

Water/gasoline/bullets might be the most used trade goods.

There wouldn't be currency. There would be trade of materials based on their perceived value against each other.

Maybe. Depends on how close to the edge of survival people are.

I can't eat, drink or protect myself with gold.

>we used easily destroyed cash as currency

That is the only problem with caps. The only solution i can see is using scales to weigh mass amounts of caps fot large purchases

This. There is no currency without agreed societal norms, which don't exist.

>But bullets are something everyone could use and therefore are universally valuable
1.) No, not everyone can use bullets
2.) Munitions are not universal, and in fact, a lot of guns use proprietary or distinct cartriges.
3.) Anything mass manufactured post-society either stops existing or becomes insanely expensive
4.) If ammunition becomes currency somehow despite this, firearms must ALSO become currency as well, or there is no market, because the base ammunition has no real value. Again, post-society, fiat currency folds immediately. If you can't use it, it is, by definition, useless. This just takes you right back to point #1, #2, and #3 again.

Well, yes; but it still means that someone has to lug 50, 000 caps (or whatever) around from whatever strong-room he was storing them in to the merchant selling the very expensive thing. All without getting mugged by someone spotting the guy moving a huge chest of caps.

A practical currency is one you could use buy both a house and an apple. Mono-denominational currencies only work if they're digital, so I can carry millions of them as easily as just one, and if I want to buy something worth less than one I can trade 0.3 of a dogecoin or what-have-you.

Physical currencies really need to have different denominations, otherwise they're either too valuable for me to buy a single apple, or not valuable enough that I can practically carry enough of them to buy a house.

Energy is the currency of the future.
t. Alpha Centauri

>While people not associated with the brothels can attempt to do direct trade, at some risk of having authority figures come down on them hard for "counterfeiting"
Not counterfucking? Missed opportunities here.

Is it weird that I really like this idea?
Most because you'd have guild enforcers beating up women, and men, trying to cut into their hand job monopoly.

Condoms for variety of reasons

Back when people actually bought houses with coins, they tended not to actually carry a chest of coins. They had someone bring it by in a cart later, once the deal was done.

It sounds exactly like an Apocalypse World Magical Realm scenario.

If you're already going back to the stage where you need a currency,you have gone very far from edge of survival.

So essentially Gor?

>pic related walks to your store and asks for a pack of cigarettes
How many handjobs will that be?

>brothels act as banks which give out vouchers that can be redeemed for sexual services and these vouchers are used as currency
We're onto something here.

Depends on how many people would be willing to readily believe in a FIAT currency again. Look at the reasons people developed currency in the first place in human history, the hurdles thereof (like banks not honouring the notes of other banks, banks going under and making all their notes valueless, etc) and you'll see that it would be very unlikely that people would use bullets or TP as currency. Money exists to facilitate trade, and it's difficult to have money that also functions as something else, especially something that's consumed when used, because of the effects of deflation. Money and TP as currency SOUNDS like an okay or cool idea, but the fact is that it would be ill suited to the role for a number of reasons.

*Bullets and TP as currency

Fuck me.

You know, depending on the scale of the apocalypse, it would hit one of two things.
The first (extreme apocalypse) is outright a barter system. Services, and useful products ranging from everything.
The second is the original currency system based on the direct trade of precious metals (gold, silver etc. coins)-for medium apocalypse.

Or at least, that is what would be realistic.
We wouldn't invent a brand new currency for falling back as a civilization. We would just take up the older versions.

I don't know what these are but I have this inexplicable desire to obtain more of them.

>The first (extreme apocalypse) is outright a barter system.

There is no historical evidence that a barter economy ever existed, even in primitive societies. It's a meme.

What are trade of goods without government giving currency system that is standardized.

One time during a game the GM described payment as coins to fill most of a room and I just felt like it was needless even with bags of holding. Just fork over a few gemstones or something

Schismatrix, by Bruce Sterling. Geisha-bank

Cash doesn't dissolve like the wicked witch of the West when it comes into contact with water
A substance that is so nessessary that going without it will kill you faster than going without food

DAMMIT, WHY IS THERE NOTHING NEW UNDER THE SUN!

Give me a real world example of this happening.

Who are the trobrianders of new guinea, and how did they exist prior to contact with westerners?

>56 replies
>ctrl+f "salt"

Ya'll niggas dumb as fuck.

Pah. What else are you going to offer, bags of rice?

Hey look, I see some highlights for salt from ctrl-f.
Were you trying to imply no one had mentioned salt yet?
I thin at least one person did.

Are you perhaps insinuating that something like fucking bottle caps or gold coins are better form of currency than salt?

Oh, look, brain dead goldbug woke up. Gold would be fucking worthless as it's useless besides looking pretty. In WW2, in occupied countries, people were fucking paying gold coins for big ham (or even fucking half of bread in nazi ghettos). Even bullets, though stupid, are vastly better idea because they are useful (not only for shooting, you can lit a fire with gunpowder, make good fishing weight from bullet, or small knife from case) in post-apocalyptic setting. Hell, even fucking caps would be better as they are light, hard to counterfeit, and, both metal or plastic, have uses gold will never have...

Which bullets and how are they valued? whats the exchange rate between .22 and 5.56? Is 30-06 more valuable than 7.62x51 because it has a longer case and more brass or is 7.62 worth more because its used in far more modern semi-automatics and machine guns and thus would have a higher demand?

I really don't think something as complicated as bullets would be used as currency.

Just because Rome did it doesn't mean we have to. There are a multitude of real world nations that didn't.

I would prefer something that won't be ruined by a rain, thank you very much

Depends on guns in the area. Exchange rates are negotiated with bullet sellers

What about Not!Pokemon Cards ? People echanges trading cards, a simple card worths 1, a golden card worths 10 and a shiny card worth 100. It could be something cultural like baseball cards or MtG or Pokemon, etc

>implying society in an apocalyptic setting would use currency and wouldn't just revert into a barter economy

You can't buy a house with bills today either. It's incredibly impractical so we have banks.

And of course so did they, or temples which acted as banks.

They keep your money in their coffers for safekeeping, keep track of how much you own, and act as adjudicators for financial transactions.

(Of course even earlier there was the state run Palace Economies.)

Petrol, food, water, medicine would probably be the most valuable commodities so those.

>mtg
>pokemon
>culture
keked. Those are world wide cards.

You mean like grain, pelts, tulip bulbs, livestock, and seashells? I agree, what kind of retard would make THOSE currency?

>petrol
I think you mean "Guzzline", smeg.

The same things, except in flesh.
If you create a currency backed by meat, once there's a government you don't need to carry a swine around, instead you deposit it in a bank-farm and get a bill that can be exchanged at any time in any amount in any other bank for said swine.

Fixing my neighbor's car for a bottle of homebrew booze.

Bartering

.>53027042
>fucking paying gold coins for big ham
You have disproved your argument in your own post.

Rural Greece had been reduced to bartering for a few years due to the financial crisis.

The point is that converting money into gold then using it after the societal collapse is a bad option when you can spend said money on a large amount of imperishable goods which will be more useful than a limited amount of gold-based purchasing power in a serious post-apocalypitic scenario. Gold loses value in comparison to other goods with societal collapse by virtue of having no use, as well as most people underestimating the cost of gold and thus making trades like "ring for a couple bags of flour" seem reasonable to the one with the flour.

>1.) No, not everyone can use bullets
People used to trade in gold even though they weren't jewelers, what's your point?

>2.) Munitions are not universal, and in fact, a lot of guns use proprietary or distinct cartriges.
Not really, there's only like 5 standard NATO calibers and the soviets didn't have that much more variety either. And on the civilian market while there's technically an insane amount of variety in cartridges the market still focuses around several common calibers, most of them the standard nato calibers mentioned above.

>3.) Anything mass manufactured post-society either stops existing or becomes insanely expensive
Why?

>4.) If ammunition becomes currency somehow despite this, firearms must ALSO become currency as well, or there is no market, because the base ammunition has no real value.
It's much easier to build a gun then it is to produce finely machined brass casings that will properly interact with the gun as it's supposed to and not cause malfunctions. You could build a gun out of two properly sized pipes and a nail if you really wanted to, there's never going to be any shortage of guns so they'd make a terrible currency.

>If you can't use it, it is, by definition, useless.
But you can use it: to defend your life. And isn't your life the most valuable thing of all? Seems like a firmer backing then some dickhead politician promising they won't fire up the presses too much and cause hyperinflation, rendering your paper "money" utterly worthless.

>it's difficult to have money that also functions as something else, especially something that's consumed when used
Here's an idea: the complete cartridges (technically the bit at the ends the bullet) aren't the currency, the bullet casing that holds all the other components together is. It's not expended when shot, instead it can actually be re-used and the only reason not everybody does that is because fresh factory produced ammunition is so cheap and readily available and people are lazy. And while lead is a fairly common metal that's also quite easy to work with due to it's low melting temperature, gunpownder can be as simple as mixing saltpetre and sugar and primers can theoretically be made by someone with a limited knowledge of chemistry the casings are a whole different matter. In real life they're mass manufactured in factories using fairly modern techniques, beyond what somebody could just easily improvise. Also I don't even think it's possible for one dedicated person to just make a bullet casing out of some brass using simple hand tools, they sure as hell wouldn't be able to do it fast enough to keep up with how fast they'd be used. Kind of stupid having a guy work for five weeks to produce about 5 minutes worth of gunfire, and that's what you'd be dealing with given how exact the work would have to be for the cases to be any good, if you could even do this which I doubt.

Seeds and canned food, maybe?

the bottlecaps in Fallout were backed by water.

>the bottlecaps in Fallout were backed by water.
This.
In Fallout 1, caps were backed by the large water reserves of merchants at the Hub. The commonality of caps around the wasteland for a good while meant you an ample supple to work off of already, plus the existing caps were extremely hard to counterfeit in large numbers without an official press (which were EXTREMELY rare post-war and almost entirely in the hands of the merchants).
Add in the small weight of individual caps and their rather high durability and you got a decent replacement for old world coins (which recovering the technology of the wasteland couldn't yet reproduce in mass quantities). While definitely not perfect, they were a serviceable stop-gap.

By the time of Fallout 2, people generally used regular paper money produced by the NCR. This paper money was backed by their substantial gold reserves. Caps were still around of course, but generally were only used in areas where the NCR hadn't yet spread.

Fallout 3 went back to caps because Bethesda hasn't played the games. Granted, the East Coast wouldn't of had the NCR dollar (the NCR being based in California; only in NV, many decades later, had it reached Nevada), but they also shouldn't of had caps (which were backed by an entity literally a whole continent away). Maybe there was someone in or near DC who also backed caps?
Bethesda isn't really clear on the lore here.

Fallout NV used caps as well, stating that the NCR gold reserves were all irradiated by the Brotherhood of Steel to the point of uselessness, sending the value of their currency through the floor and forcing people back to the old standard, water-backed caps. The NCR dollar is still around, but it's just paper at this point.
The Legion, oddly enough, has functioning printing presses and actually produces coins out of rare metals such as silver and gold. These generally hold their value even outside of Legion territory.

>wouldn't of had
>shouldn't of had

Instead of "of", it's proper to say "have".

If there was an equivalent of the Hub in DC, then your idiotic goal in f3 would be even more idiotic where you fight to cause hyperinflation, because uhhh?? and erm???
Watur for eberyun! I iz scientistic!

Only one of those was ever a currency.

I know, but generally I talk and write quite informally. I prefer the sounds of "sh/wouldn't of had" to the correct form you posted. Just a matter of personal preference on my part. I know I'm wrong, but I don't intend to quit any time soon.

I'm also quite sleep-deprived right now and wrote and rewrote that post for longer than I should have. If you would be so kinda as to excuse as errors I would be most appreciative.

Actually grain, sea shells, and pelts have all been used as money at some point or other.

For example the shekel of memes originally referred to a weight of barley used as currency.

After a while you'd likely see quarters, dimes, nickels and pennies being used as currency, but their value would be much greater than what it is right now.

On that note, what's the best Metro to play? I've got both regular and Redux versions of both games.

Fun fact: The slang term "buck" for a dollar is because of when buck pelts were used as currency.

Roughcut diamonds are the closest thing to a universal currency in war-torn Africa, because the jewelry companies will reliably pay anyone who has them. So, any resource that allows the majority to trade with whomever is doing the best of the bunch, maybe well enough to value things of no practical value, like jewels.

There's a more glaring uncanny valley effect in Redux, largely because while the textures/lighting/shaders have drastically been upgraded, most of the facial animation and emoting remain unchanged. There are some other minute changes here and there, but they're negligible and don't impact the game in any meaningful way. Redux is the way to IMO.

some kind of coinage made from the tin from food cans, linking their value to the value of the food the can they're made from once contained. Some Native Americans traded 'wompum', which were beads carved from clam-shells, which linked the value of the beads to the food-value of the clams.

Oh yeah, the dubs changed too. The original came across as authentic slavs- Redux is a traditional English cast imitating Slav accents and every third person is Steve Blum. A bit more noticeable.

That's fine, uncanny valley doesn't really bug me. I'm more wondering about 2033 vs Last Light