There's a detail I am trying to set up in my game. Its scifi, and runs on credits. I am fine handwaving money transfers, but Id like a logical, in-universe solution for when people want hard currency. I've come up with a solution and I want to know if its stupid.
Plastic cards with chips in them. The cards are cheap to produce. Any person in universe could buy a pack of 50. You can load the credits onto them and then give the card to someone life a giftcard. After you receive a card from someone, you can even use it yourself for others. making it even easier to find.
But I cant think of how to limit counterfeiting in a universe where a card full of credits could end up on another planet. Unless I handwave that the card has such a feature.
have I thought too hard on this? Is there a better option?
There's no reason all transactions can't be digital. If people want to trade physical currency, it's to avoid being traced, and in that case, they'd do it with precious materials such as rare metals, radioactive material, fuel, and drugs. Standardized machine parts could also work.
Elijah Ramirez
I didnt want to have the setting be all physical currency, just have a practical hard option for whatever reason
Joseph Stewart
It's not stupid at all. The digital currency is itself secure, regardless of where it's stored.
Actually, I'd imagine these would be quite popular with smugglers, black marketeers, and various other petty lawbreakers. Why leave a digital trail when you can just hand over a crate full of plastic cards?
Jack Hughes
You could just make it paper money, produced with special future printers which include and record microvariations in a database. When someone tries to use a large bill, the vendor scans it, and the data is sent to the data center, where it compares the scan with the print data associated with the bill's serial number.
John Howard
If I was a smugling mogul and you tried to pay me with a crate full of cards I now have to check every single fucking one of to be sure my money is sound, I'd shoot your balls off for the trouble.
Ethan Phillips
Scanners. Have your thug hold the scanner to the crate. He remotely scans all the cards contained like one can do with real cards now, and gives you the total
Christopher Turner
That's very similar to how it works in Traveller. Cards are like mini ATMs you carry in your pocket which keeps track of how much money you've got and used, occasionally syncing with a real bank. Trying to open it up and tamper with it tends to trip the safeguards, erasing everything on it. Here, have a thing on how pensions work.
Aiden Roberts
That should work fine, I think it would be fun to have a display on them that shows the amount on the card so you can have a handful of big numbers like good ol cash. Maybe have the color and images on them change based on the amount of currency in the card along with some like CREDITS BACKED BY THE SPACE FEDERATION. I do like having good old paper currency in futuristic campaigns, having antiquated stuff in Sci Fi settings is a great aesthetic.
Nathan Allen
>load the credits onto them
What's to stop someone from loading non-existing credit onto a card? Shouldn't the credit itself be like in a bank, and the card is merely coded to access that credit?
I would imagine that in a universe where reliable FTL communication doesn't exist, valuable commodities would have a place in interstellar trade. As the bank on planet Qwerty can't make sure your Asdfian bank account has the money you're trying to pay with. On the other hand, I guess you could charge it as credit and then deduct it from the customer's bank account once the bank conducts their monthly FTL transaction with other planets. Or something.
I dunno, banking is weird. All I know is that I got numbers on my account and thing costs X amount of numbers, and I swipe my card and exchange numbers for things.
Nathaniel Bailey
I was thinking about this, and in my setting, interstellar communication isn't possible. Information exchange piggybacks on FTL ships, like letter couriers.
A busy central planet that gets a lot of ship traffic gets information sent and received pretty quickly because ships with letters, general news, and stock information comes and goes fairly frequently.
But remote systems only get info updates if a ship is coming or going.
This whole system pretty much makes online banking and money transfer either really unreliable or really slow.
An example would be you want to buy something online. You make the order and transfer credits. That order and credits pretty much wait at your planet's transfer station that is waiting for a ship to arrive in the sector. When the ship arrives, they get sent to the ship's onboard courier system (it's standard that every ship has one, and it's considered a federal crime to hack or read information on them), then the ship leaves with your order and credits. You better hope that ship is going to the planet that is selling the item you want, or going somewhere it can be dropped off at a transfer station where another ship going to the desired planet is heading towards. This can mean your order can either take a few weeks, or a few months.
So in this universe the most reliable currency is a physical form, like an actual precious metal, or some print money that is extremely difficult to duplicate. Credit and bank transfers are still used, but can take days. Not useful if you are just stopping to get a drink at the relay stain pub
William Phillips
That's the opposite of being untraceable. You might as well just transfer the money.
Have a robust checksum system on the cards that has to add up right with the numbers sent out by issuing entity. Each piece of currency, no matter what random denomination you make it, will add up with its matching checksum in vendor and bank databases. This means that money has to be printed or installed onto cards at a registered bank or financial institution (or through their net site, at least) and may take a while before it is actually usable. On-planet checksums might be updated by the minute, while offworld will take however long it takes for FTL comms to send the right data along.
Benjamin Carter
Well I didn't know that. I'm sticking with it though.
In our setting travel is very limited too, it's only possible to go FTL on certain lanes in space in certain directions. It's all part of a subspace weather or currents that ships use for travel. Sometimes the currents change, catapulting lesser known planets to importance, and sometimes dooming others.
Andrew Perry
Just use cryptocurrency. Call it FasterThanLiteCoin. Treat the cards like a hardware coin wallet. It's all cryptography and blockchain data.
Luke Foster
An example of how this works Say you have 3.8 kavaarkian rubles on your card, because you're a poor pleb. You spend 2 on a cup of space coffee. For a few seconds, your card can't work because it won't calculate correctly. The vendor's system updates the local bank (V'Kkkkdik'frk Credit Union), which recalculates the back end of the checksum to account for the new total. Within a few seconds, every financial system on and near planet has the new number and the card works again. It takes [FTL comm timeframe] before the new backend reaches offworld institutions, which could result in fraud if you can outrun their communication. In such a setting, there would likely be a time limit between transactions, or a hardcoded lock in the card itself on any transaction offworld. But basically, this lets you carry a bank account with you on a physical medium. If it gets stolen, report its serial number and get its checksum scrambled so it can't be used anymore.
Ayden Rodriguez
Here's an idea: the basis of the currency is something finite, stored in one central bank. Maybe it's prime numbers (I know primes are infinite, but after a certain point it becomes too hard to find the next one, so they're functionally finite), the point is, they must be unique. The central bank assigns each prime to an atom. Each atom has a pair to which they are linked with quantum entanglement (the sci-fi version, where if you poke one atom, its pair gets poked as well, enabling instantaneous and secure communication). The physical currency (let's call them tokens) consists of one of these atoms and a transmitter that can communicate with the central bank via the atom. You want larger denominations? Put more atoms into the transmitter. To prevent fraud, you use a simple scanner that can communicate with the central bank and the tokens. It basically asks for confirmation through the token, and the bank sends a confirmation to the token and the scanner. If they match, the token is valid. Electronic payment works just like in real life. You take the tokens to a bank and they put it on your account. This also means that you can have bank robberies, because the banks need to physically store the tokens.
Juan Moore
My suggestion is to have physical currency be produced by banks, or the government, and the only way to get it is to withdraw your digital currency at an official place or machine, so you can't just buy the cards so easily. The 'cards' also have a set worth, signified by what type of metal they are. But they're all cheap metal, it's pointless to have them be gold and silver and platinum. They can LOOK like gold, silver, and platinum, but they aren't. They have several hard to reproduce touches, just like real money. Maybe they have specially magnetized components, or have micro-inscriptions.
It's basically traditional hard currency. Maybe a bit closer to space fantasy with the obvious analogue to silver and gold coins, but that's just what I like.
Camden Walker
I think I would just use a black market scrip currency. A cartel or mafia group enables untraceable trading via issuing their own version of currency (Could be encrypted cards like OP's image), backed by actual commodities they have stashed (IE Drugs, Guns, other small but high value objects). Petty criminals like it because they can avoid using a centralized currency that tracks them, mafia likes it because they get a cut on every transaction which has made them filthy rich.
Colton Evans
>But I cant think of how to limit counterfeiting in a universe where a card full of credits could end up on another planet. Unless I handwave that the card has such a feature. Use cryptocurrency and block chain principles. The card contains a key to a specific set of 'digi-coins' that is shown on a little screen on the card face because of sci-fi reasons. The card acts as a bank note and gift card. If the card is cashed out, it either shows the new balance OR Breaks itself of the balance reaches 0.
>Well I didn't know that. I'm sticking with it though.
As you should, a lot of people have put a lot of thought into how it works in Traveller over the past 40 years. The fact that you got such similar results on your own speaks well of your abilities at worldbuilding. (Especially when I've seen plenty of other people over the years come up with shit that would never work.)
James Diaz
I was thinking this, but having the cards just contain a really complex code that unlocks a wallet.
Nolan Butler
GOLD PRESSED LATINUM
Carson James
Poo. They trade in poo. Think about it. Poo is both this highest and lowest embodiment of society. The rural farmer needs poo to make good food. The best food goes to the aristos. In a scifi setting, where science and technology and knowledge is valued, the richest people will be properly nourished the best (we see this in our own society where the rich pay a premium to eat fucking kale and “superfoods” while the poor chug calorie dense fast food). And this the richest people produce the best poo.
A finite amount of poo can be produced per day, capped by food production and consumption, and poo needs to be consumed to produce food that produces poo, ensuring that the poo-based currency can never really overinflate nor spike in value.
Producing the best poo gives you the highest capital, ensuring the rich people always stay rich while the poor only produce low demand poo, thereby locking society in and freezing the societal ladder, which is what any end-game sci-fi dystopia wants.
Tl;dr: Peg your sci-fi currency to poo.
Samuel Nguyen
I read a quote somewhere, and if any elegan/tg/entlemen can direct me to the source I would be much appreciative
Basically it said that a competent government realizes that a black market is essential to the survival of a nation, and having untraceable cash is ultimately good for everyone in the nation. I think one of the given reasons was that having the ability to pay someone for an illegal good or activity using legal cash was preferable to having to commit further crimes to compensate the original criminal. Basically, it's better to have cash so you can pay a drug dealer in exchange for drugs than to NOT have cash and have to steal a TV set to give to the drug dealer in exchange for drugs.
So whatever you decide, keep in mind that a sufficiently-advanced culture that has space travel and shit will probably have come to the conclusion that having untraceable hard currency is better than having only digital currency.
Carson Anderson
Each "credit" is actually something called a supercycle. It uses hyperwave technology to run a computer faster then the speed of light; computers stockpile the information for later easy usage, meaning a single credit can greatly boost speeds of computers. Using this advanced technology is the only way to make things like virtual reality and produce new hyper-intelligent AI and run run atomic converter machines that can make anything out of raw atoms you tell it to.
Nobody can counterfeit the currency because it's a computer cycle. You need a ton of energy and a server farm to make it.
Julian Fisher
I think that a system like the modern credit card would work perfectly well. You get your payment sent digitally to you account, whether personal or with a bank, and you can make digital transactions with whatever the mobile device of the century is, or use your card as a backup.
Lincoln Miller
Crystallography and radioisotopes. The issuing body publish a database of valid card serial numbers and the measurements of the identification part that go with it. It's cheap for them to produce crystals or small radiological samples or what-have-you, but very very expensive to replicate them exactly. Extremely high values are traded using objects with several identification marks in tandem, with full specifications publicly known. Cheap cards look like thick plastic with engraved/filled writing and a single dull stone. A trillion credit chit looks like the Queen's sceptre or Megatron's cock.
