Payment options on the (SF) frontier

[thrash]

I had considered using something like Traveller's high passage vouchers (from the Traveller's Aid Society membership) as a de facto standard currency. The actual amount of time and effort any given voucher would represent was so variable, however, that I couldn't see it working that way.

This does point to a larger possibility, however: "everything is negotiable." Currency, coins, bearer bonds, letters of credit, freight and passenger vouchers, bars of precious metal, etc., all exist, but there are effectively no hard-and-fast exchange rates. Every transaction is barter at some level, subject to bargaining. For players who enjoy that kind of action, it's a chance to exercise their social skills. For those that don't, a roll on the Actual Value Table (or some such) covers the outcome.

I think this can exist on a spectrum with the "bank in a box" idea, which depends on leaving a very definite audit trail (even if the individual box may be owned by "bearer"). The bank box is for straight-up legitimate business, well within the scope of both the law (such as it is) and corporate policy. The grayer the business, and the farther from the main stream, the more likely it is to involve barter.

The economy is based on the corporations supplying their outposts with necessary goods from Terra. Any surpluses (due to changing circumstances or errors in ordering), together with some luxury goods (alcohol most noticeably, but spices, furs, etc., as well) developed by other independents, are swapped around by the free traders as speculative trade. In the process, they also carry digital mail and some physical packages.

[Irish Wolf]

Don't neglect frontier inflation, along with a tendency to use barter because there simply is no cash. I'm put in mind of a line from Robert Service's "The Ballad of Hard-Luck Henry":

You know these Yukon eggs of ours - some green, some pink, some blue -
A dollar per, assorted tints, assorted flavors too.

[DAT]

For a different angle - Energy. Assuming everyone doesn't have access to their own "Mr. Fusion"

The commonly traded currency could be anti-matter. Independent starships "trade" antimatter-fuel for local currency, and then trade any left over local currency back to the company's ship/fuel depot for anti-matter before they leave. Likely a incoming ship's reserves are checked, a letter of credit written, and the accounts resolved before the ship leaves.

Or it could be straight electrical power. Ship lands and connects to the local grid. Credit starts accruing for the energy provided from the ship. Captain/crew pay from their local credit balance for cargo and supplies. When ship is ready to leave, it is determined if they have a positive balance or not. If it is zero or positive, they are allowed to leave. Balances remain until the next time they return.
-Dan

[dcarson]

Even in the 1970s rural Alaska you would get people circulating checks since cash flowed out of the small towns to places that insisted on cash. So a internal transaction might involve part A giving party B a check for $20.37 from party D, a check for $12.45 from party E and some change back to even it out.

In international trade when the USSR was first opening up but didn't have lots of foreign reserves Pepsi got its profits one year in the form of old subs to sell for scrap.

[jason taylor]

What technological differences are there? It probably won't be enough for glass beads or equiv to have the same effect. But there might be something.

[whswhs]

This is a complex question, and I've been thinking about it for a while.

It seems to me that a planetary development corporation has two main uses for "money." One is to deal with Earth; unless it's simply developing the planet in isolation, and never exporting anything, it has to ship things out, and to exchange them on Earth for money, and to retain some kind of bank balance usable for purchasing import goods, paying Earth personnel and ship crews, and meeting incidental expenses. The other is to deal with its own personnel on the planet. It can do that with corporate scrip, and have administered prices that let it ensure itself of a good return from its company stores; or it can just use Earth money and tweak the local prices as it likes, the way a movie theater charges much more for a soda than you would pay outside the doors.

Now here comes an independent trader. Presumably the company wants the trader to be there, or it would just never let it land. So it has to make it worthwhile for the trader to be there.

Does it pay the trader in local scrip? If so, then when the trader is done resupplying itself, and buying whatever goods are for sale, it's likely to have a little scrip left over. If that's basically pretty paper, or meaningless numbers in an accounting file, then the trader has lost part of its sales proceeds. That's going to hurt its profits, and I expect that in the long run either trade will shut down, or it will be confined to planets that don't pull this sort of thing. It's also worth noting that the corporation may want to sell its own products to the trader, and it probably doesn't sell those for its own corporate scrip.

Does it pay the trader in Earth currency? That may be acceptable to traders, if Earth currency is good on most outplanets. It may well be; the outplanets are betting on Earth currency remaining liquid already, so they're all likely to take it at face value, either in physical form or in the form of virtual negotiable instruments—electronic documents that say "Dai-Ichi Rossiyan Mercantile Bank promises to pay bearer $X," and that are stamped in some way that ensures authenticity.

If trade with Earth is infrequent, and corporations maintain something more like planned economies, they don't have that option. But they're still going to need to have something to offer traders. I can see two alternatives here:

* You do it the way Russian businesses used to do it (and maybe still do), stocking up on goods that are in high demand and can readily be traded further on: vodka, jewelry, high-end electronics, drugs, gourmet foods, that sort of thing. When the trader comes in you say, "We've got X and Y and Z." This is kind of the way potlatch systems work.

* You have a specific good emerge as generally recognized as desirable, and acceptable in trade in confidence that other people will take it too. This is likely to be high value for weight; durable; homogenous; divisible; likely to maintain value over time—and you might as well call it "gold," though it may be some entirely different commodity. In any case it will work, more or less, in a situation where there isn't "legal tender."

In any case, to deal with the traders, you pretty much have to have something to offer them whose value isn't purely local. Corporations will figure out something, or they'll go without.

[Boomerang]

Originally Posted by DAT

For a different angle - Energy. Assuming everyone doesn't have access to their own "Mr. Fusion"

The commonly traded currency could be anti-matter. Independent starships "trade" antimatter-fuel for local currency, and then trade any left over local currency back to the company's ship/fuel depot for anti-matter before they leave. Likely a incoming ship's reserves are checked, a letter of credit written, and the accounts resolved before the ship leaves.

Or it could be straight electrical power. Ship lands and connects to the local grid. Credit starts accruing for the energy provided from the ship. Captain/crew pay from their local credit balance for cargo and supplies. When ship is ready to leave, it is determined if they have a positive balance or not. If it is zero or positive, they are allowed to leave. Balances remain until the next time they return.
-Dan

This sounds suitably futuristic.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Boomerang

This sounds suitably futuristic.

Futuristic enough that it was the assumption of the star frontiers game more than 30 years ago. Star Frontiers was actually kind of retrotech even then.

The idea didn't actually wo0rk out that well even then. This was even though PCs had no way to ever actually generate energy themselves. They could only buy it from NPCs and store it.

As a general hint if choosing a commodity to base your means of exchange on don't choose one whose supply is easily expandable when that becomes desirable.

[lwcamp]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

As a general hint if choosing a commodity to base your means of exchange on don't choose one whose supply is easily expandable when that becomes desirable.

Which, incidentally, probably rules out actual gold in space-faring games. Siderophile elements can probably be easily mined from asteroids, so gold, platinum, silver, iridium, ruthenium, and rhodium will all be more abundant than on modern earth and you can easily get more by going to another asteroid. Chalcophile elements might work better - like copper - or rare earth elements (which are not all that rare, but are hard to extract).

Luke

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by lwcamp

Which, incidentally, probably rules out actual gold in space-faring games. Siderophile elements can probably be easily mined from asteroids, so gold, platinum, silver, iridium, ruthenium, and rhodium will all be more abundant than on modern earth and you can easily get more by going to another asteroid. Chalcophile elements might work better - like copper - or rare earth elements (which are not all that rare, but are hard to extract).

Now that's clever hard science based sfnal thinking. I approve. Does that mean that asteroid mining will make catalytic systems substantially cheaper?