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How Do I Pay For This?


Asperion

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In most scifi systems the issue of money will usually be hand waved away as a non issue or all economic systems will generally be handled by a generic credit system that seems to work every where and place.  The author will usually be lazy and copy reality by saying that people still use plastic cards or something similar,  but look at what changes have been made since the mid-1980's. It's only reasonable to believe that one,  two,  or more centuries down the road people will eliminate the plastic cards and replace them with something that would be harder to loose,  fool,  copy,  and has many more properties.  I also doubt that people would use a generic term as "credit ". What systems have you either seen or used in various scifi games or stories? How do they work? What terms are being employed? (As normal) other comments,  criticisms,  whatever is welcome. 

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Here are the notes on money for my Planetary Romance campaign on the world of Sard. "Vitrium" resembles glass, but is much more resilient, to the extent that some of the vitrium structures built by the planet's extinct natives were still intact and habitable when humans arrived 20 million years later.

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Money

The Sardian colonists came from a world where most people used fiat money (whose value is created by decree and the amount in circulation, rather than based on precious metals or other commodities). Electronic or paper money was not very practical on a frontier planet, though, and metal was too scarce and useful to turn into coins. So they made coins out of vitrium.

 

Sard produces humanity’s most colorful money. The pictures or abstract designs cast into the vitrium coins are just so people can tell them apart: The physical form of Sardian currency is, unfortunately, quite easy to forge. Authenticity comes from a tiny strip of gold micro-engraved with dots in a complex code. A laser scanner reads the strip within the coin. Any computer can carry the other half of the code, and so verify the money is real. In the last few decades, though, most governments haven’t bothered to include the code-strips, and fewer people have laser scanners and computers. This gives breakaway nobles the opening to coin their own money, which is worth exactly as much as their ability to force it on other people.

 

For centuries, Karkovy’s military and economic dominance made its money the most trusted on Sard. Anywhere on the planet, people still accept the Karkovan ruble. Other coins are described in terms of their equivalent in rubles. The local names for coins are largely ignored as well. People usually call their money “spangles” or “glasses.” So someone might speak of paying in ten-ruble spangles from Vajranagar.

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Dean Shomshak

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In Lois McMaster Bujold's "Vorkosigan" series, the Betan Dollar seems to have established itself as the most trusted interstellar currency. For instance, the barons of the lawless planet Jackson's Whole use Betan dollars -- it's noted in passing that they insist on hard currency. The value of the Barrayar Imperial Mark relative to the Betan dollar has improved in recent years, though.

 

In its technologically-regressed Time of Isolation, Barrayar used gold coins. In the setting "present," the District Counts pay their taxes to the Imperium by comm-link transfer... but but the legal fiction remains that this is a gift on the Emperor's birthday, and each Count still shows up in person to give the Emperor a symbolic bag of gold coins.

 

Gold coins are apparently still valuable in interstellar society, though. A treasure-hoard from the period when the Cetaqgandan Empire occupied Barrayar includes chests of gold coins along with art objects, documents and other bric-a-brac. Several chests of these coins are considered a suitable finder's fee, and an adequate war chest for making a power-play on Jackson's Whole.

 

AFAIK the details of monetary theory have never been explicated in the setting, though. Like, are Betan dollars a hard currency because they are backed by gold or some other commodity, or are the Betans just really good at maintaining trust in their money?

 

Dean Shomshak

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I think I read this in one of the Stainless Steel Rat novels by Harry Harrison.  A world used a medium if exchange called wir that were based on labor provided by the individual, and used to purchase the produce of the labor of others. They were tracked by a global computer network.  Sorta market communism.

 

Another interesting one from Tanith Lee's Drinking Sapphire Wine:  the virtually-immortal people living in domed cities on a distant-future Earth had all their needs met by robots - who were powered by (thus paid in) human gratitude.  

 

 

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  • 3 months later...

Try reading Cyberpunk authors like William Gibson.  In his material everything is computerized and people will walk down the road and be automatically taxed for using it, vendors will assault passerbys in Cyberspace hacking there wares in their head while the user's avatar spoke to them.

 

He had the idea that all money was digital and the banks controlled it.

 

The shadowy undertypes had to use a cred stick which was essentially a USB drive with its own built in encryption that allowed whoever held it to use it to transfer money to accounts digitally.

 

Every person had to have a chip in their head which tattled who they were to any program that asked.  It could be set to an incognito mode however this was meaningless to police and anyone who was a good enough hacker.  Think the SIN in Shadowrun.  To use money outside the control of the government which in this world is the corporations one had to essentially hack the loopholes in the system to transfer digital money unseen.

 

I guess think of it as Bitcoin where the corporations that back the money have a back door to the algorithm.

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    Shadowrun had “cred sticks”.  (Probably swiped from Gibson)

  An amount was deposited in a bank and the account number and passwords were hard copied into the stick.  It had to put physically into a cred slot to deliver a specified amount like a credit/gift card. No remote hacking could be done because the stick had no way to remote transmit or receive info.

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19 hours ago, Tjack said:

    No remote hacking could be done because the stick had no way to remote transmit or receive info.

 

Maybe in the Shadow run world but IRL there is nothing that cannot be hacked.

 

Just ask the guys at BitCoin!  Happened to them a few years back albeit the processor handling transfers was compromised and not the algorithm.

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   If you’re using the word “Hack” to include social engineering (like pickpocketing) than you’re right....but if you mean computer hacking, than I have a paper list of phone numbers in my wallet that begs to disagree.  That’s basically what a cred stick is.   A hard copy of information about an particular bank account.  The best computer hacker in the world can’t beat a padlock.  Different hardware, different skills. 

17 minutes ago, indy523 said:

 

Maybe in the Shadow run world but IRL there is nothing that cannot be hacked.

 

Just ask the guys at BitCoin!  Happened to them a few years back albeit the processor handling transfers was compromised and not the algorithm.

 

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2 hours ago, Tjack said:

   If you’re using the word “Hack” to include social engineering (like pickpocketing) than you’re right....but if you mean computer hacking, than I have a paper list of phone numbers in my wallet that begs to disagree.  That’s basically what a cred stick is.   A hard copy of information about an particular bank account.  The best computer hacker in the world can’t beat a padlock.  Different hardware, different skills. 

 

 

Anything electronic can be hacked.  There is a spy device developed by the CIA called a Van Ek device I think.  Essentially what it is, is a very sensitive device to pick up local radio waves and has an effective range of a few miles.

 

Take the spinning hard disk of a computer.  It has a completely unique system of magnetic dots over it that are spinning quickly.  This creates a unique magnetic signature that is released into space as radio waves.  The Van Ek device can pick up this signature and decipher it to track a computer.

 

As the computer is used one has to create electronic signals by depressing the keyboard or moving the mouse.  That signal creates an electrical impulse that is sent along the wires inside of it.  Either through a hard line to the computer or to the part of the keyboard that translates the signal to bluetooth.  The receiver in the computer then has to translate the blue tooth an d send it along wires to the CPU.  Likewise a signal is sent from the CPU to the monitor the computer is using.

 

These devices also create faint  but unique and changing radio signatures that can be picked up by equipment sensitive to it.  The programming in the Van ek system can then translate those signals to code and the input output signal of the computer can be deciphered and a signal recreated real time that mirrors the keyboard commands typed letter by letter, the mouse strokes moved as they happened and the video and audio that were produced by the monitor.

 

So, technically if the computer is offline you cannot read what is in the files but you can recreate every command and every output that the computer received and produced essentially hacking an unhackable computer not connected to the internet.  Even if you go old school and use wires for I/O and not bluetooth.

 

Rumor is that this device was used in Columbia when the CIA was hunting for Pablo Escabar.  They had at the time encryption that could not be hacked or decoded because it used a key way to long for even supercomputers of the day.  What the Cartel did not know is that did not matter because they could see the video screens, hear the audio and had a keylogger transcript of everything they typed and the mouse moves.

 

Anything digital can be hacked!  It is just a matter of how great a length one will go to in order to do it.

Edited by indy523
Wrong person Pablo Escobar not Hugo Chavez - dumb
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