Whilst an average film overall, the movie ‘In Time’ has an interesting concept for currency set in a near future sci fi dystopia.
Humanity has cured aging, and everyone stops aging at 25. Then their clock starts; indicated by a tattoo like digital clock on their forearm. Everything is paid for with time taken off their clock, once it reaches 0, they immediately die. Jobs pay employees a time salary etc, and the rich horde and manipulate the time markets to concentrate their wealth, and keep the poor from achieving the immortality they horde.
I enjoyed it, and I’m sure plenty others did, but there’s no denying that a rather large suspension of belief is required.
I think it’s a clever metaphor for the disparity in living standards and the real value of human life in a corrupt marketplace.
But the actual implementation of the story was a bit clumsy and heavy handed.
In Time is definitely one of my favorite movies. It has some great world building around this concept.
We’re literally living that life and we’ve always lived it since the dawn of currency, fiat.
How long you’re going to survive after you reach zero wealth left to your own devices, homeless on the streets? Until the first rough winter?
Depends on how resourceful you are. You don’t automatically die once you run out of money. Also, no amount of money grants immortality.
Be a medieval peasant.
Harvest comes in
Load 1,000 pounds of produce onto a mule
Mule dies
Throw mule and produce on shoulders
Walk to market
Set up stall
Sign: “Apples - 1 gold piece”
Sell a single apple
Am now the wealthiest man in town
Go across the street to buy a wool tunic
Attempt to make change
Merchant cannot make change for a single gold piece
So he kills me and becomes wealthiest man in town
Repeat this for every shop in town
Literally one guy left in village
Mongols show up
Take gold piece
Return to China
China countries to be the wealthiest country on Earth for another century
the why did the wealthiest man in town give all his fortune for a single apple?
I’m making a mars-themed luanti modpack (it’s FOSS and available here btw), and i intend to use water as the currency, if i ever get to trading.
Water is a scarce and useful resource on Mars. That’s all it takes to make a meaningful currency out of it.
Expect a mod fork to change it to piss lol
The problem with using water as currency is that it is heavy. It is not reasonable to carry around large amounts. You’ll need some kind of representational currency.
Caves of Qud uses water as currency. I think it explains this by making all of its characters weirdo radiation freakazoids that can teleport and fly around and stuff.
You’ll need some kind of representational currency
yep that’s exactly what i think would make sense in the real world. basically a paper currency backed by real water. one dollar represents 1 kg of water.
it’s like the gold standard, just not backed by gold but by water.
in the game that doesn’t matter though since you can just carry around a lot of water bottles before your inventory space runs out.
That works until someone starts manipulating the market by redeeming their dollars for water, selling the water on the market, getting dollars again, redeeming for more water and continuously profiting from the endless cycle.
This is actually why the gold standard ended. Money and real world materials will fluctuate in value and are sold on different markets. Having money pegged to a real world material means someone can take advantage of a treasury by manipulating those markets. This was happening with the US dollar, then the Nixon shock happened and no more gold standard.
Why would people in the future use a currency system that’s similar to one that we used in the past and stopped using because it was fundamentally flawed and vulnerable to manipulation? I suppose if it’s set in a small community where there isn’t anyone that would work out how to manipulate the currency it might work. But if there were bad actors, you’d expect a water based currency system to be manipulated same as the gold based system was before the Nixon shock.
Kinda fucked up that when coming up with a SciFi dystopia the worst we can think of is the Nestlé-buck.
It is telling, isn’t it?
To pivot I can also imagine information and energy scarcity, be it real or artificial.
“Bury your water, kids.”
Down And Out in the Magic Kingdom, by Cory Doctorow:
This future history book takes place in the 22nd century, mostly in Walt Disney World. Walt Disney World Disney World is run by rival adhocracies, each dedicated to providing the best experience to the park’s visitors and competing for the Whuffie the guests offer. In the post-scarcity world of the novel, Whuffie is a currency-like system that primarily measures the esteem of others, or in the case of extremely low Whuffie, their disdain.
Game set in Pokemon. Currency is pokedollars.
If I made a sci-fi game I would just make the currency MWh. They handwave away so much science, why not have a watch sized device that can store insane amounts of power?
Which makes me wonder, is there a physics limit to the density of energy? There has to be, anyone know what it’s called?
[…] why not have a watch sized device that can store insane amounts of power?
Because Hiroshima was leveled by “only” 20 MWh (cost ranges from 120€ in northern Scandinavia to 1010€ in Greece) so having people carry energy wallets with enough to make more around day to day is like paying your groceries bill with C4 (which is perfectly save as long as there is no primary explosive).
Yeah, but they will have a perfect safe containment device, and a way to transfer safely, just like they have FTL.
is there a physics limit to the density of energy
the physics limit to the density of energy is literally a black hole. it compresses the maximum amount of mass (energy) into a space. but that’s technologically useless since you can’t extract the energy out of it on-demand.
The densest ways of storing energy that are technologically useful are:
- batteries (Na-Ion batteries: 0.2 kWh/kg)
- oil/carbon-based fuels (bread: 5 kWh/kg)
- uranium (pure uranium: 24 * 10^6 kWh/kg)
There’s also speculative technologies like antimatter (24 * 10^9 kWh/kg) which aren’t available today.
The beauty of using uranium as currency is that if anyone hoards too much of it, the problem takes care of itself.
So one gram of antimatter could power a modern city for like three months? That’s wild.
There actually is a method that could be used to extract energy out of a black hole. Probably not something you’d build in a watch-sized device though.
it only seems to work for rotating black holes though?
Yeah, that’s why you have to wind up your watch every now and then. To spin up its internal black hole again.
just drink more it’ll start spinning soon enough
Don’t they all spin though? As in any matter falls in one way or another angular momentum is gained.
It is possible, but very unlikely. Maybe two bh merge that has exactly opposite angular momentum.
If the well, event horrizon expands when a blackhole takes more mass, why can’t we just figure out how much volume it is compressed into by measuring the event horrizon increase?
We know the matter that goes in is a certain size. Maybe we can deduce the total size it is compressed to? And the size the blackhole gains.
It’s impossible to know based on the current understanding of particle physics. A black hole is formed when the inward gravitational force exceeds the outward neutron degeneracy pressure of a sufficiently massive object, which is what keeps neutrons from occupying the same space (not really, it’s complicated). Beyond that, only conjecture exists with no evidence, and the information paradox makes it impossible to observe the space inside the event horizon.
Stellaris is a space 4x game that uses energy as a universal currency. The Endless Space games are also 4x games that use ancient nanomachines called Dust as currency.
And yes, concentrating energy increases mass. E=MC^2, which means more Energy must necessarily mean more Mass. So basically gravity will be your hard limit, theoretically stuffing enough energy into small enough a place will create a black hole, though I assume if you’re talking electricity then there’s probably some physical limit you would hit first.
We have technological limits to the storage efficiencies of different types of batteries. Batteries defined as something that can store useable energy. If we are talking just energy, matter “stores” lots of energy, and you can look at the famous Einstein equation to play with numbers. I do know we have something like a matter density limit in black holes.
Matter, expressed in mass, so kilograms or tons.
Mfw the currency is money
One bread costs 5 whole gold coins. Because obviously.
Well, it’s one bread Michael! How much could it cost? Ten gold coins?
This is what I love about the Legend of Zelda games, it’s “rupee”, which comes from “ruby”:
Rupee is likely derived from or a corruption of ruby, a valuable gemstone. As a result, Rupees were frequently misnamed early in the series, such as the name “Rupy” in the original The Legend of Zelda. In the German versions of The Legend of Zelda games, a Rupee is called a Rubin, which is German for ruby. Ironically, Red Rupees resemble rubies.
They’re valuable gems of indeterminate size, not necessarily related to rubies or actual gems (could be glass or something), and have no direct comparison to any actual currency (unlike gold) but we can understand some amount of inherent value (better than credits). It’s unique to the game, and denominated as a single number.
Some other ideas for units:
- sovereigns - as long as the person in charge is a king
- in-game term related to the region (like Euro is to Europe)
- chips - could be metal, glass, gemstones, etc
Keep it vague so people don’t lose immersion by comparing to realm world units, or not have any inherent wealth. That said, “credits” is better than “gold,” just a bit cliché.
Metro series games use bullets as a currency. Theyre small, not easily produceable in the setting, and have inherent value (you can shoot your money at enemies). Great design.
In reverend insanity “money” was basically just “mana potions.”
You can also get weird with it. Brandon Sanderson likes to tie money to a world’s magic system so in the world where people have metal based magic it’s coins called clips and boxings, but in the world where hurricanes make gemstones glow with magic it’s spheres of glass with gems called chips, marks, and broams
Yup, and that’s partly where my suggestion of “chips” came from. The money term isn’t a huge deal, but just changing the name to something relevant in world is cool.
Could swear I’ve seen a setting where the currency was sovereigns, but there was no king. Literally “cash is king”.
I guess you don’t need a king, since sovereign refers to the government, but when it comes to currency, I’d assume “sovereign” is referring to the picture of the ruler on the currency. I don’t know many who call their chief executive/head of state a “sovereign”, but most would use that to describe a monarch.
No spacebucks?
Spacebukz
Spacebux
What if money was just called hours?
Difficult jobs are worth more hours than easy jobs and require more specialized skills. If the specific skill is not part of the repertoire then the job will be exceptionally difficult and/or impossible.
In the not-too-distant future
You can’t start a sentence with that and not expect me to get distracted thinking of a certain theme song.
All Star by Smash Mouth?
Honestly a face of mine. Acting is solid and storyline is like a dystopian Robin Hood almost.
This is a good one to show people to get them thinking about class consciousness.
There were some experiments where currency was actually denominated in hours, usually as part of a co-op system where you were literally trading for hours of labour.
I think the most famous one was in Ithaca, NY.
But an hour waiting on an email shouldn’t be the same as an hour of heavy lifting
would love to read more about this
That one was called the Ithaca HOUR. I learned about the Cincinnati Time Store, which was maybe the first one, on a podcast that I cannot find now. So I’m somewhat useless but there are some names to search at least!
Can’t do that because hours are gods.
You gained Brouzouf.
But are your legs OK?
Tell me you’ve never played a jrpg without telling me you’ve never played a jrpg
stupid comment
“tell me X without telling me X”
Insufferably obnoxious too
“Tell me”
Imperative case absolutionist too
Imagine being mad at a meme comment. Would you have preferred “Jrpgs: Hold my beer”?
Fr though there’s gil, rupees, bells, munny, zenny
I’m not mad, you’re mad
