Delance said:
Well, do people even use paper money on WC? By the 2650's the currency is probably just eletronic/virtual.
Suppose you have a bank account in, say, New Detroit. You can pay for everything there with your credit card. Now, for some reason, you travel to Caernarvon Station in the Gwynedd System, Enigma sector. Your bank account is several days away - not just for travel, but for any sort of communication (the WC4 novel indicates the time lag in communication is considerable). This, multiplied by two, is the amount if time it takes for any credit card purchase to be cleared. This may well be acceptable if you're making a big purchase, like a new Centurion or something. However, waiting a week when all you wanted was a Lynch Cola would be a bit excessive. So, paper or metal money is still needed because it's portable.
Also, hard currency would presumably be needed for the kind of transactions that the Retros conducted with Governor Menesch and the Kilrathi... since terrorist organisations usually have a hard time keeping an open bank account
. Indeed, I'd guess that almost any transaction you make at a pirate base in Privateer is in hard currency.
And finally, inflation - if your money is purely electronic, it's even worse than paper money. With paper money, at least everyone knows when the government issues more. With purely electronic money, on the other hand, you can never know how much money there is currently being circulated, and you therefore don't know its value. Indeed, what's to stop a corrupt bank official in the middle of nowhere from adding a few million electronic credits to the accounts of their customers? Sure, In-Sys would quickly catch on and shut them down, but by that time, the damage will have been done. All this would result in sky-high inflation. A million credits might be enough for three Centurions one day, and not enough for a Lynch Cola the next.
