"How much is that in real money?" Topic

My indoor skirmish/RPG settings--Rixx' Cafe Aldaran for SF, and the Blue Distelfink for Ren/fantasy--are now furnished, populated and generally ready for thieves, spies, rebels and smugglers to collide with each other and with The Man (or The Dwarf or The Narn: not trying to be speciesist.) But there needs to be currency. Clearly the Distelfink will operate on the traditional 12/20/1 of the pre-Revolutionary world, and the future belongs to decimalization as surely as all the furniture will be plain and gray, but what should the coins and units of account be called? And is there no viable alternative to everyone in the future dealing in "Credits?" Is the Fellician millifennig no longer listed in the exchange? It's drivel, SF and fantasy, people. Let's add some amusement to the worlds!

Just to start the ball rolling, for fantasy I'm thinking of a 21-unit figure of account for upper-crust dealings, to be called the "Kush" in honor of the Guinea. What else have we got?

Playing the board game Space Base here at home, we call the moneys "Space Shekels".

But we do honour Andre Norton for the coining of Credits (and Blasters, and Free Traders). She did blaze a trail!

Fantasy thought: twelve bronze horels to the silver solar, and twenty solar to the gold kohors (mangled Latin "hour", "sun", and "gang", with the idea that a horel buys an hour's labor, a solar hires a man for a day, and a kohors hires a shift of workmen).

For the sci-fi unit, something about the cost to transport a kilogram one parsec?

Quatloos!

But, when I was Tsar Raoul I Raskolnikov, Slobbovia DGIOS, my son and heir apparent Rutabaga Raskolnikov tore up the railroads in the War of the Valgorian Succession.
When he became Tsar DGIOS, he based the Slobbovian Robitnik on railway gravel.
This was a currency that had an actual value outside of just by fiat.

I recommend going Old West with "bits". That way you can go with a binary-like system which feels both future and retro at the same time.

If you really wanted to buy into it, you could be unitless (no name for the base unit), and only talk in base-two exponents.

neg3 = 2^-3 = 1/8 base unit (this is an old west bit)
neg2 = 2^-2 = 1/4
neg1 = 2^-1 = 1/2
naught = 2^0 = 1 (which is great 0 means 1)
pos1 = 2^1 = 2 base units (so 1 means 2)
pos2 = 2^2 = 4 base units
and so on

You could even go with

posbyte = 2^8 = 256
posK = 2^10 = 1024
posword = 2^16 = 65,536

too make some convenient scaled units.

If you really, really want a base unit name, I would go with Drachma. I miss handfulls of Drachma.

A "bit" was a bit of a coin when a Spanish gold dollar wis split into eighths.
So, "2 bits" was equivalent to a quarter of a dollar. A gold Spanish dollar.

But, as I said in my Slobbovian post above, gold is a "fiat" currency.
Railroad gravel has a Real Value.

Quatloos are like Bitcoin. The ultimate "fiat currency." It has value because Those Guys say it does.

Any wretched hive of scum and villainy would inevitably deal in multiple currencies, each in value inversely proportional to its' "shadyness."

The Credit 1/100 being the default currency of the central authority. Digital to insure The Man could manipulate its value to exploit the working stiffs around payday.

Thalers 1/100 being the "hard" currency that's generally preferred. Only available as coins. Issued by a sanctioned entity like The Iron Bank its very stable tho not so much in circulation.

Ingots 1/- being highly valuable precious assayed metal tokens. Usually locked securely away. Nesteggy stuff used for BIG transactions.

Caps being the "coppers" of trade. 50 Caps to the Credit. 10 Caps buys a cup of thin soup.

Gold-pressed Latinum has the advantage that it cannot be replicated.

100 Slips = 1 Strip
20 Strips = 1 Bar
20 Bars = 1 Brick

A "bit" was a bit of a coin when a Spanish gold dollar wis split into eighths.
So, "2 bits" was equivalent to a quarter of a dollar. A gold Spanish dollar.

The bit as an eighth of a standard coin is later than pieces of eight. 1736 is where the OED pins down bit as a term, still piracy time, but after the big party – Blackbeard, Calico Jack and Bartholmew Roberts (the real industrial level pirate) were dead by then.

Pieces of eight was based on the peso, a standard weight (peso means weight in Spanish) of silver. Reals (RAY-ahls) were the 1/8 fraction.

Its interesting that reals predate pesos. Eight reals turned out to be a functional weight of silver that could be "verified", so it made a good trade standard. Physically breaking a peso into eight reals (the equivalent of the old real in weight) came after standardization.

Bit wasn't used by the Spanish. The equivalent would be "torzo" or "pedazo", probably. But in documents they used "real" (royal, citing the royal authority for the old coins) or "un octavo" (an eighth) when you get to the peso.

Still the fact that 8 bits lines up with 8 binary bits makes a nice Old West feel – Shave and a Haircut … Two Bits!

link

Two bits!
Four bits!
Six bits!
A dollar!
All for St John's, stand up and holler!
I had a crush on Barb the cheerleader…

'Any wretched hive of scum and villainy would inevitably deal in multiple currencies, each in value inversely proportional to its' "shadyness."'

Perfectly true, Exeter! (And if you think the currencies are shady, you should see some of the clientele.) But I figure any such establishment should have one (and only one) person, hereby designated The Schermerhorn, who decides who gets to run a tab, and what this stuff is worth in whatever currency they use to keep the books--or, now that I think of it, to bill The Patrol. No pockets in Lensman's Grays, seemingly.

Bits for any future Wild West establishment. Presumably any equivalent in the wilder outposts of the British Empire would calculate everything in sterling, but everyone would know how many rupees to a shilling.

SciFi has a long history of being equated to the Old West. There are a lot of parallels there:

* Infrastructure = there is civilization around
* Frontier = low-governance environment
* Distance from center = weak law enforcement
* Scarcity = conflict driver
* Mobility (horse ↔ spaceship) = agency
* Specialist violence (gunslinger ↔ bounty hunter)

Just don't use the Triganic Ningi/Pu system.