Intergalactic Currency

...

Why dont use barter?
>Metals
Depends on the metal, civilizations could use it to produce computers, weapons, ships...
>Meals
You may consume it or trade it for something else
>Technology
>Information

>without FTL information transfer?
If you can travel FTL in a 5 tons ship why information wouldn't?
And if it wouldn't (really) just limit the frontiers of each region a light-year from the central bank

Traveller has put a lot of thought into this sort of thing, because it's vital to the existence of the Third Imperium. In that universe, comms speed is limited to travel speed, so mail boats are the primary method of interstellar communication. Virtually unforgeable plastic bills are what the economy is based on. There are also bank cards which act as a sort of portable teller and contain your banking info, transaction history, etc. Tampering with them triggers failsafes that will wipe the contents, and if you somehow managed to do so you'd still get caught eventually.

Have a thing that's somewhat related to your question, on how pensions work.

Quantum entanglement does not transfer any information, user. If someone told you it does, tell them they're a dipshit.

I assumed because he said "Firefly-esque" that he meant no FTL ships, since Firefly's ship are limited to light speed. Not that it's important, the important thing is that communications are no faster than you can run, meaning you could theoretically outrun the news of your crimes.
(Which is actually great, as Traveller players can tell you. It's super difficult to pull off for any length of time, and sooner or later something will happen and the ships full of wanted posters will get to the next system ahead of you)

>Have the bank 10 light years away.
>You fall victim to a bank heist.
>It takes 10 years before you even heard of it.

Such is life in the interstellar economy.

Ships have limited warpdrive FTL that can't be used over long periods of time or distance.
Communication is "slow FTL" - expensive and requires a prohibitive amount of power. FTL comms are only possible via interstellar relay stations and reserved for important or public federal information.
This way, couriers are still a thing, so I can give my PCs a bit more to do for a hook or plotline.

My GM did something like this. He basically said that space governments would still operate on credit within easy communication range, but that they would have to encrypt credit onto physical disks and send them around any further out like physical currency. Just imagine the old west bank carts and trains rushing money across vast, hostile territory.

Underrated, this was a very coherent and entertaining read, as well as being very sensible and applicable. Good post, user!

Nearly instant communication is quite a new thing.
Before that there were banks and state currency and it worked fine.
So there is no reason it woudn't work with "slow" ftl.

First idea is to carry encrypted bank account with you with copy in each bank department, that is periodically transferred to earth where it is checked if all transactions adds up.

Multiple local digital economies limited by comms range, with a standardized interstellar hard currency used for long distance trade.

If you are close enough to a digital economy planet, its like using a credit card today. You can even sorta manage that if there is a 20 or 40 min round trip transaction time, but its a pain in the ass. More than that and you start needing hard currency, something people agree is worth something anywhere. Likely backed by a major trade hub.

My favorite hard currency is a platinum bead wrapped around a glass container holding a single wood shaving. The platinum is worthless metal, just a coating. The glass is inscribed with marking information that makes it trackable. The wood shaving is what makes it valuable and is damn near impossible to counterfeit, as its a proprietary brand of genetically engineered seedless tree that is grown only on one planet for this specific purpose. As long as no one else can grow their own, the wood shaving is unique and thus a sign the bead is legit.

>My favorite hard currency is a platinum bead wrapped around a glass container holding a single wood shaving. The platinum is worthless metal, just a coating. The glass is inscribed with marking information that makes it trackable. The wood shaving is what makes it valuable and is damn near impossible to counterfeit, as its a proprietary brand of genetically engineered seedless tree that is grown only on one planet for this specific purpose. As long as no one else can grow their own, the wood shaving is unique and thus a sign the bead is legit.
Uh... Either the shaving contains intact genetic material, in which case anyone with sufficiently advanced facilities can in fact grow their own trees using it, or it doesn't in which case it doesn't matter that the plant is genetically unique, since it doesn't take an exact genetic copy to create counterfeits. And it's actually worse than just having sufficiently advanced printing facilities, since there aren't many reasons beyond counterfeiting to have a printer that can make good counterfeits, but there are plenty of reasons to have a genetics lab.

Oh, and you probably have to break the glass to be absolutely sure that it's not a flawed counterfeit.

SpaceMaster uses money made of precious material (melt down value is less than coin value but prevents total worthlessness.)
They also have limited FTL communication that requires relay stations that are only used by governments and the wealthy. Lots of missions for pcs to 'cut the telegraph lines'. Imperial banks and local economies can vary due to local conditions, but money is real. They also use 'Elmonits' for convenience but they are tied to the local coinage.

No hard currency is 100% counterfeit proof. But at least the tree thing ups the level of investment needed to fake it such that you need a state level actor or major corp to pull it off. Its also much harder to hide a grove of trees than it is to hide a printing machine.

And again, what are your other options? Metal is worthless, digital cards are hackable or can be copied. There are mo perfect solutions, only a least bad option.

This works until someone spends more money in different places than they have in their account

I'm toying with a similar idea, having a currency backed by an energy value that would work on inner, more developed worlds but would require physical tokens the further out you go.
Acronym Quasi Universal Interplanetary Denomination

Just allow FTL information transfer. And also bartering.

>This works until someone spends more money in different places than they have in their account

Well there'll be a grace period when you enter a new system. The bank won't allow you to take out more than a nominal amount until the latest reports have come from the neighboring branches, especially the one in the system you just left.
You can probably take out enough for a cheap hotel during the grace period. I imagine the cap would be just enough to rise past small space claims court and hit space misdemeanor so they can press space charges on people who try to take advantage of the banks.
Once they have up-to-date records of your previous transactions (taking into account how fast ships move vs how fast comms move. Making them both the same speed will make things easier on you as the GM) you can safely withdraw whatever you like and the bank will be safe in the knowledge that you actually have that money in your account.

Oxygen
Computing Cycles
Hyperwave material (emits faster then light radiation)
Generic Credits

Oxygen is all over the place. Try something else down the line in the periodic table of the elements.

For reference: Earth is 30.1% oxygen in diverse chemical compounds: rocks, dirt, air, water... Is the third most common atom in the universe.

>Hyperwave material (emits faster then light radiation)

Cool, so it gives your past self cancer!

Why would metal be useless? Are there alien cows that secrete starship fuel? Geese that lay golden eggs? Trees that grow computer chips? Is this Pre-Ferengi Star Trek?

If all these things are true, It sure isn't Fireflyesque.

You could still use catgirl slaves as currency. :)

Not that guy, but in any setting where space travel is trivial, metals become worthless because you have access to utterly ludicrous amounts of any metal you could name via asteroids, comets, and other bodies.

You need a lot of fuel to mine any of those. And then you need actual mining infrastructure, you need smelters, etc.

I mean, we have, in theory, access to ludicrous amounts of energy simply because solar panels are a thing. Doesn't mean energy is free.

Estimated abundances of the chemical elements in the Solar System. (logarithmic scale).

Metal isnt useless, just worthless as currency.

You have to understand just how much metal is freely available in space. Do you consider gold valuable? What if I told you that there exists, right now, a single large asteroid floating in our real world asteroid belt that is the size of Chicago and is 70% gold. Its just sitting there, more gold than has ever been held in human hands since humans evolved hands. With minimal refinement needed, since there isnt a lot else mixed in with it.

This asteroid is not special or unique. Its just one we know of, earmarked for asteroid mining once Elon Musk finds a way to do that.

Similarly large deposits of iron, platinum, and all sorts of other useful shit are in the belt too. The only hard part is getting to them, but in a space setting thats no longer hard.

Gold is worth many, many times less than paper in space. Because somebody had to make that paper. They couldnt just go for a drive, roll down the window, and pick up as much as they could carry.

What about antimatter as currency
>not widely available
>needs large amounts of power to produce
>can be used as fuel
Just need an easily portable way to contain it.

Probably wouldnt want to carry around bombs just to buy gum. Seems like it might be a bad idea somehow.

Why not proton-sized black holes now that we are at it (about two Empire-State Buildings in mass)?

>You need a lot of fuel to mine any of those.

Nothing compared to the energy you need for interplanetary travel, much less interstellar.

You don't even need solar panels, a simple lens can be used to melt stuff in space. Your big problem is just cooling it, and that can be done with patience and a shadow.

It'll leak radiation and evaporate.

In 3.5 years time. Meanwhile, it may be possible to keep it stable by pouring mass inside against the tide of Hawking radiation.

You can make proton-sized black holes artificially, just like anti-matter. It requires huge quantities of energy, like those of a partial Dyson Swarm, but are ideal for spaceships and as a method to store all that energy.

>Figure II
Good one

>How could an intergalactic, universal, government-issued currency work in a sci fi setting without FTL information transfer?

Without FTL you can not have an intergalactic, universal government.

I assumed he meant interstellar. Intergalactic is hard to justify even with FTL, much less without.

Yeah. Historically, it's very hard to keep any sort of even nominally centralized empire coherent if routine travel and communication times inside it takes more than a year from edge to edge. That makes ruling even your own Oort cloud a dubious proposition. However, that assume baseline mortal humans still are the norm. It may be different if immortality is achieved (which is far more likely than FTL), certain technologies are employed that encourage social structures less mutable, or you have AI ruling things who plan over thousands or millions of years.

Not as hard to reach as you think. It is believe that as big as half the stars in the universe are outside galaxies. You could make a pathway to another galaxy by colonizing these worlds. Even without these, antimatter and black hole ships are fast enough to reach other galaxies even outside the local group.

There are a couple of small galaxies that are closer than the stars at the other edge of our galaxy. Any big galaxy like ours is a serious cannibal.

>Not as hard to reach as you think. It is believe that as big as half the stars in the universe are outside galaxies. You could make a pathway to another galaxy by colonizing these worlds. Even without these, antimatter and black hole ships are fast enough to reach other galaxies even outside the local group.

That's still a massive undertaking for many generations. Even with a really fast FTL drive, the 2,540,000 light years to Andromeda (roughly like crossing the Milky Way five times) is a hell of long way to go in one jump, longer if you have to stop constantly, and worse still if you mean to stretch your empire out and run things on both sides of that gap..
If you just go to Canis Major, our nearest dwarf galaxy, that's still 26,000 light years. Doable, but it's only one billion stars, kind of chump change for a galaxy.

Not that poster, but how could entanglement not transmit data, if I read the spin of entangled Atom1 and its pair Atom2 will have opposite spin how is that not data transmission. And if you say something about how you don't get to pick the spin of Atom1 well there are ways of getting around that for the creative. Also, you just check your entanglements based on a universal clock so Atom2 is always checked after Atom1 is checked.

That is pretty much how modern Economy works when you Look at how the value of Money ist guranteed.

Don't anthropomorphise the Milky Way; it hates that.

You have no way of deciding what the entangled state will be. You open the box, the other guy opens the box, and then when you compare notes later on you find out you had the same result. There's no way you could use it to send a message between the locations.
No information is transferred, which is not surprising since c is the speed of causality.

I imagine you’d use local fiat currency for small transactions.

What percentage of the time when you compare notes do you get the same result? If when entanglement occurs is predictable than the results not being doesn't matter. If you answer my question I will tell you how to send messages using semi-random particle states.

Sorry, I didn't proof read.
>If when entanglement occurs is predictable than the results not being doesn't matter
By this I mean, entangled atoms always share states after note checking then you don't need to check notes.

Unless your campaign is based around this currency and its destruction or introduction you should just call it "credits" or some generic shit backed by vague space gems or space alloys and stop making mountains out of molehills. If any of your players know what crypto actually is then theyll know that it wouldnt work without ftl information transfers anyways.

I probably scared you off, but I will explain anyway. If you could entangle two atoms and know some of their properties (position, momentum, spin, and polarization) before measuring them and be sure that you have entangled the particles and that they will be correlated then you can order the recievers atoms 1,2,3,etc.. to be checked chronologically after a certain time and the sender can entangle extra particles with his Atom2, for example, so that the receiver will know that Atom2 signifies a change aka a 1 bit rather than a zero bit. This assumes that some of the particles properties can be known beforehand which I have no idea as I am not a phycisist, but neither are you most likely.

A credit system backed by intergalactic government.

Users spend credits using whatever device, which is then synchronised automatically as soon as possible to the central system, as well as local hubs.

While in theory this could be hacked or manipulated to allow you to spend credit you don't have, the banks come down very hard on anyone that does, and the devices use top of the line security.

Alternatively, cash only, which can be exchanged for local area specific credit. Local area credit can be transferred between regions, but this takes time (dependent on interstellar communication) and potentially has fees involved, like any bank transfer.
Basically the same as internation trade nowadays, but on a larger scale.

>How could an intergalactic, universal, government-issued currency work in a sci fi setting without FTL information transfer?

Wait, what the FUCK? I don't mean this as insulting, but what the hell kinda setting lacks long distance FTL -- but has, I presume, an intergalactic civilization or government? How's that even work?

Again, not in the insulting sense, I genuinely am trying hard to imagine it.

>If you could entangle two atoms and know some of their properties (position, momentum, spin, and polarization) before measuring them
You can't. Two particles having some state (for example the direction of its spin) entangled means that measuring that state for particle 1 yields a random result (50% chance for up, 50% chance for down) and measuring it for particle 2 also yields a random result, but if you know the results of both measurements (which requires transmitting them to the same location, obviously) you'll notice there's a correlation between them (in the case of spin, they tend to point in opposite directions).

Basically, if you take two particles and you measure them completely knowing all 4 attributes (or more), can you entangle them and have an idea of the range of possibility for those entangled particles or do all states of the particle become unknowable, if they are not you can introduce a third particle that the sender entangles with his particle in order to put the recievers particle outside of a range he would consider normal and so being a 1bit.

Here is an example of an impossible data transfer: The no-communication theorem implies the no-cloning theorem, which states that quantum states cannot be (perfectly) copied. That is, cloning is a sufficient condition for the communication of classical information to occur. To see this, suppose that quantum states could be cloned. Assume parts of a maximally entangled Bell state are distributed to Alice and Bob. Alice could send bits to Bob in the following way: If Alice wishes to transmit a "0", she measures the spin of her electron in the z direction, collapsing Bob's state to either
| z + ⟩ B {\displaystyle |z+\rangle _{B}}
or
| z − ⟩ B {\displaystyle |z-\rangle _{B}}
. To transmit "1", Alice does nothing to her qubit. Bob creates many copies of his electron's state, and measures the spin of each copy in the z direction. Bob will know that Alice has transmitted a "0" if all his measurements will produce the same result; otherwise, his measurements will have outcomes
| z + ⟩ B {\displaystyle |z+\rangle _{B}}
or
| z − ⟩ B {\displaystyle |z-\rangle _{B}}
with equal probability. This would allow Alice and Bob to communicate classical bits between each other (possibly across space-like separations, violating causality).
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-communication_theorem
The problem stated in this example is that Bob creates many copies of his bit. My example does not require any copying, but only entangling a third particle and I haven't seen it disproven.

>That's still a massive undertaking for many generations.

Just as it is a massive generational undertaking to colonise our galaxy without FTL. It is still doable. In any case, it is possible that people will be immortal by them which is a technology far more likely than ever discovering FTL.

Maybe so, but "intergalactic government" is never gonna happen, it'd be two separate governments at best.

Probably like Warhammer 40k: Extremely clumsy and decentralized (40k has FTL but that's not the point). Without FTL, an intergalactic empire will be very decentralised, thousands of years old, massive, and its members would live just as long. Actually, even with FTL it will be like that. The Milky Way is immense.

Dunno man, how'd it work a few hundred years ago?

Fuck that guy, he causes all my problems.

why can't I find these kind of thread on Veeky Forums dammit?

I find more usefull stuff here than there.

>if you take two particles and you measure them completely knowing all 4 attributes (or more)
This is irrelevant. Getting entangled randomizes the entangled attributes.

>can you entangle them and have an idea of the range of possibility for those entangled particles or do all states of the particle become unknowable
Suppose particles A and B have their spins entangled. Suppose we then measure them. There are 4 possible outcomes:
A up and B up
A up and B down
A down and B up
A down and B down
The chances of A having its spin up is 50%, the chances of B having its spin up is also 50%, but he chances of A and B both having their spin up or both having their spin down is not 50%, as it would be for non-entangled particles.

>you can introduce a third particle that the sender entangles with his particle in order to put the recievers particle outside of a range he would consider normal and so being a 1bit
You can entangle any number of particles, but measuring any one of them still has 50% chance of yielding spin up or spin down. Particle A being entangled to particle B does not affect the probability of measuring a particular value on either A or B in any way. It's only when you compare the measurements when you notice something weird going on.

>How could an intergalactic, universal, government-issued currency work in a sci fi setting without FTL information transfer?
It can't. But it doesn't matter because we can simply assume that computers are arranging a potentially long series of currency trades in the background whenever needed at exchange rates calculated by AI so every currency is good everywhere. In practice, this means that everyone uses "credits" and has as much say over financial policy as the size of their economy warrants.

I never appreciated just how big space is until I played Elite Dangerous. You go FTL and think you've gone super far because a journey took forever. Then you zoom out and realize you barely made a dent in your trip to the next nearest planet of any value. Then you zoom out more and realize you've basically never left your tiny bubble in the galaxy. Then you zoom out further amd realize the entirety of explored space doesn't include hardly any of the galaxy. Then you zoom out more and realize that there are other galaxies further away than from you than if you crossed your whole galaxy multiple times.

If FTL ships run on antimatter it would make a good basis for a currency. Governments would tend to have the most, but there would be some at every starport. You would use electronic and/or physical notes of some sort that is redeemable for starship fuel. How to make these immune to counterfeit attempts is an issue.

If you don't have an instant communication system, like Star Trek's subspace, you transfer data on starships which is a FTL data distribution system.

You would have local governments that managed their own currency as well as Imperial currency. This will allow local currencies to rise and fall based on the local economy.

I agree that a sensible size limit for an Empire is about how far a fast ship can go in a year. Assuming that the seat of government is in the center, that is 6 months out and 6 back.

I really like that Firefly doesn't have FTL.

Not too sure about currency, but trade in the first place would be interesting, after all, given how moving large quantities of mass over interstellar distances is difficult, a normal type of trade would work. Therefore, I think it would be plausible for trade networks to consist of two main things: a) data (entertainment, intelligence, news, scientific breakthroughs, et cetera), or b) processes instead of products.
What I mean by b is that if you wished to trade, say, 10 megatons of carbon nanotube to your neighboring star system who can't make it themselves for example, instead of giving them that much material (which would be prohibitively expensive to transport), you could give them a sealed, tamper proof black box process, good for producing your 10 megatons of nanotubes from a raw carbon input. This wouldn't quite be the same as actually trading the resources, but it would be pretty close. I mention this because I've never really seen the idea used before, and so I thought OP would perhaps use it in his games. After all, this sort of thing is especially interesting from a Veeky Forums perspective, there's a fuckton of different plots which could be derived from this one technology, from political intrigue and espionage, to high stakes space piracy, to a myriad of other things. I've not really run a space based game before, but even I can see the potential.

Note that such space empires can be hold together by mere inertia and duct tape, and a bit of absolute ruthlessnes given how glacial are the interactions between systems.

Government-issued currencies and banks predate the internet you know. Intergalactic banks would just work like they did, only with space-couriers instead of land-couriers.