A lot of people are touching on the "why bottlecaps instead of something else as currency" problem in this thread, but as someone who has studied currency - somewhere between doing it as a hobby, and being a currency scholar in the sense that I have done a fair bit of research on the subject - allow me to elaborate.
You're touching on a real-world problem: the bottlecaps representing water exchangeable in the NCR on the other west coast, but still being used on the east coast.
In the game, the currency represented two things: -An idea, in the abstract sense; that is, an idea is a noun in the sense it is not a person or a place, but a 'thing', but in this case an intangible thing you cannot see or feel but still exists. The abstract idea the currency represents is value, and you can assign that value not only to bottlecaps but also to labor and consumer goods -It's also simultaneously literally used to represent the ability to exchange those caps for water. In other words, although you usually wouldn't always do it, you could in theory exchange those bottle caps for, say, a liter of water.*** This represents a separate problem, but we're coming back to that.
Did you know that, in the United States, you used to be able to exchange individual dollar bills for gold and silver? You can look up U.S. $1 Silver Certificates from, say, 1957. They look a LOT like modern U.S. $1 bills. Note the picture below: the blue stamp is not present on modern U.S. $1 bills. Nor do the phrases "this certifies that there is on deposit in the treasury of" or "silver certificate" or "in silver payable to the bearer on demand".
But there were a lot of practical problems with this: 1. if you were carrying the silver on you, you had to actually check it into a bank and have it tested and weighed to determine how much silver was actually present; they did this because you could shave little bits off here and there and if the bank wasn't checking the weight and content they would lose quite a bit of money this way; 2. That $1 bill is *significantly* lighter than that 1 oz silver round, and can be folded many times, thus making it far easier to transport several hundred or even several thousand of these than the equivalent weight in silver. A thousand ounces of silver would be worth just $1,000 but weigh 63lbs; that much paper money would weigh less than 1 pound. Worse still, you could print a single $1,000 bill that has as much value as that 63lbs of silver but weigh just a few grams. This also makes it *significantly* safer to transport that $1,000 as a single paper note you can easily hide than a fat wad of silver someone could pilfer off of you. 3. All of these things now also mean not only is that store of value more physically secure, but it's *way* easier for merchants to do business with paper money than with all of this coinage floating around. Remember, paper money like this is a VERY new invention; at least, the fiat money is. All of these arguments are also weighted against gold coins, by the way: the silver and gold are scarce, but the paper money is made from wood pulp (paper), cotton, ink, and water, and those are almost as plentiful as all of the grains of sand worldwide.
For all of these reasons, the preferable choice is to *always* have a currency represent not just the value itself, but represent the value of something else. Therefore, it makes almost zero sense to use precious metals in the production of currency, but to use something that is dirt cheap and easily replaceable. Hence, you have paper money supplanting silver and gold coinage in widespread circulation. It's an order of magnitude less expensive to mint a single $1 bill than it is to mint a $1 Silver Eagle (aka a 1 oz silver round) from the U.S. mint: somewhere from just a couple of cents for the paper bill to about $100 to put it in your hands direct to the consumer from the mint today.
This then brings us back to the problem mentioned above***:
using bottlecaps to represent, in this case, a liter of water. Or, more specifically, a given quantity of water measured by weight. That's significant because water does expand and contract depending on temperature. That might not sound like much, but the temperatures in colorado are several tens of degrees lower, on average, than those in say, Nevada or Florida or the East Coast in the summertime. This means, first off, you need to have someone with some basic know-how of how to know the value of water based on the temperature of the water, the purity of it (how clean it is), and what volume you have. That will determine the actual value of the water. ...hmm...physical measurements of purity and weight, gee, doesn't that sound a lot like what I was talking about above with the gold and silver coinage? How you had to have someone actually measure that stuff to make sure they weren't getting shortchanged? Are we starting to understand the pattern here?
There's another pattern, too: that damn water is heavy. A single bottlecap is 2.22 grams, but a single liter of water at room temperature is 1,000 grams. But how much weight can you move with cattle? Well we don't have any real-world stats on Brahmin, but an ox can handle about 12,000 pounds (which is about 5,443 kilograms, or 5,443,000 grams). That means that ox can pull 5,443 liters of water or about 2,450,000 bottlecaps. Keep in mind the currency is not the thing of value itself, but a representation of the value of something else, and it's way easier to count bottlecaps than it is to get a mass spectrometer - or in its place, a thermometer (which aren't being made anymore) and a sophisticated water filter (which also isn't being made), in addition to skilled labor (which doesn't exist) - to determine the value of what it is you have. That's not to say anybody will actually move 2.5 million bottlecaps at once because that's asking to be robbed in the wasteland; the metaphor is just there to compare the idea of stores of value.
Through all of this, bear in mind that we're suspending disbelief just a little bit that bottlecaps were the currency of choice because they're supposedly impossible to counterfeit. This is the "fiction" part of the game you're supposed to accept and not argue with, but the rest of it is supposed to have a basis in reality.
With all of that in mind, the bottlecaps are valuable on their own because they cannot be counterfeited, but it technically isn't impossible to replace them with another currency. Good luck getting anyone else on board with your paper money made with your printing press, however, unless they have a way to control it, too. But you'd need a unified national government, or a coalition of governments (like the EU or the CSA) to make that happen. There is, however, a precedent for separate nation-states to use the same currency: the florin. It was gold, sure, but it was also currency used by different countries, and made separately, but to roughly the same standards of purity such that it could be traded across national borders with what was expected to be equivalent value. In other words, this is an analog of the bottlecap in fallout, except that nobody is actually manufacturing the caps anymore but everyone is still using them.
In summary, you thus have a system in Fallout where multiple separate fiefdoms/nation-states are using the same currency, manufactured centuries ago but still in production, not as a thing of value itself but as a store of value used in trade in place of something else by virtue of the currency being significantly easier and safer to exchange and move around than hunks of gold or huge vats of water.
I've got an idea, how about that caps became the new gold reserve? Therefore when people say caps in game they are referring to the "dollars" as caps as a name, rather than in a literal sense
caps originaly were the curency to a version of gold reserve, caps only value in fallout 1 was that they represented water backed by the water merchants
I really, really like this. I dislike East Coast Fallout for a lot of reasons, but one of my main ones (Other than Super Mutants being there for a very contrived reason) is the use of caps. In Fallout 1 and 2 there were explanations for people using caps as money. In 3 and 4? Nope! But really, thanks, good mod.
in 2 you can find a cash of like 10,000 caps and when you look at it it says this "These are worthless bottle caps. You've heard that at one time they were used as money, though you suspect its only a story."
To everyone not understanding why caps are used as curency. Its a currency, a representation of a value not he value itself. Just as our money is just a representation of gold. Caps were backed up by water from the Hub. Lets say a brahmin is worth 1000 liters of water. If a merchant wants to buy a brahmin but does not want to carry 1000 liters water around he choses a curency which he gives to the brahmin farmer with the garanty that he gets water for it in the Hub whenever he wants. Thats how curreny works. An I.O.U on paper. Nuka Cola caps are hard to copy without the machinery and ink to print on them. At least at the time Fallout 1 was playing.
Yes, caps were backed up by water from the Hub. The problem is that the Hub is on the West Coast, in the NCR; literally a different country thousands of miles away. That doesn't explain why the Commonwealth uses them, or for that matter why the Capital Wasteland used them.
caps stoped beiong used by fallout 2 bethesda just wanted to play nistalgia to keep old fans when they made 3 bethesdas fallout strategy is two things moddible good thing their and nistalgia bombing
qoute from fallout 2 "These are worthless bottle caps. You've heard that at one time they were used as money, though you suspect its only a story." they never stook around they relied purely on the water merchants hold of the hub as soon as the ncr stabilised the area they lost power and the cap died
Well it's not very immersive considering what's the state of pre-war money after 200 years (even if found in secured locations) However bottlecaps are also very bad choice for currency speaking realistically:
- How in the world would you carry around more than say 20 of them? And we deal with vendors in hundreds, sometimes thousands - How would anyone prevent them from being forged? If we have tech to disassemble that useless junk and create tier4 laser weapons (hello science4/gun nut 4/etc) then even without the Institute something as easy as creating the bottlecap out of an aluminum can would be a child-play - Even if not forged, how to deal with the high amortization rate? Even coins are destroyed with time, not to say fragile bottlecaps
And the list goes on. I wonder what could be the "currency" realistically speaking in such setting - and the currency that is accepted everywhere. One won't be fed by a botltecap of whatever other money you come up with, so it's likely to rollback to just barter.
... immersion mod of the year: "no bottlecaps or other currency in-game"!! Someone please implement it :p
Hey when do you think you'll make mods again? Cause I think subway tokens being made into a currency would be a great mod to make, it's never been made before too and I'm sure it would make more sense as a currency.
56 comments
You're touching on a real-world problem: the bottlecaps representing water exchangeable in the NCR on the other west coast, but still being used on the east coast.
In the game, the currency represented two things:
-An idea, in the abstract sense; that is, an idea is a noun in the sense it is not a person or a place, but a 'thing', but in this case an intangible thing you cannot see or feel but still exists. The abstract idea the currency represents is value, and you can assign that value not only to bottlecaps but also to labor and consumer goods
-It's also simultaneously literally used to represent the ability to exchange those caps for water. In other words, although you usually wouldn't always do it, you could in theory exchange those bottle caps for, say, a liter of water.*** This represents a separate problem, but we're coming back to that.
Did you know that, in the United States, you used to be able to exchange individual dollar bills for gold and silver? You can look up U.S. $1 Silver Certificates from, say, 1957. They look a LOT like modern U.S. $1 bills. Note the picture below: the blue stamp is not present on modern U.S. $1 bills. Nor do the phrases "this certifies that there is on deposit in the treasury of" or "silver certificate" or "in silver payable to the bearer on demand".
But there were a lot of practical problems with this:
1. if you were carrying the silver on you, you had to actually check it into a bank and have it tested and weighed to determine how much silver was actually present; they did this because you could shave little bits off here and there and if the bank wasn't checking the weight and content they would lose quite a bit of money this way;
2. That $1 bill is *significantly* lighter than that 1 oz silver round, and can be folded many times, thus making it far easier to transport several hundred or even several thousand of these than the equivalent weight in silver. A thousand ounces of silver would be worth just $1,000 but weigh 63lbs; that much paper money would weigh less than 1 pound. Worse still, you could print a single $1,000 bill that has as much value as that 63lbs of silver but weigh just a few grams. This also makes it *significantly* safer to transport that $1,000 as a single paper note you can easily hide than a fat wad of silver someone could pilfer off of you.
3. All of these things now also mean not only is that store of value more physically secure, but it's *way* easier for merchants to do business with paper money than with all of this coinage floating around. Remember, paper money like this is a VERY new invention; at least, the fiat money is. All of these arguments are also weighted against gold coins, by the way: the silver and gold are scarce, but the paper money is made from wood pulp (paper), cotton, ink, and water, and those are almost as plentiful as all of the grains of sand worldwide.
For all of these reasons, the preferable choice is to *always* have a currency represent not just the value itself, but represent the value of something else. Therefore, it makes almost zero sense to use precious metals in the production of currency, but to use something that is dirt cheap and easily replaceable. Hence, you have paper money supplanting silver and gold coinage in widespread circulation. It's an order of magnitude less expensive to mint a single $1 bill than it is to mint a $1 Silver Eagle (aka a 1 oz silver round) from the U.S. mint: somewhere from just a couple of cents for the paper bill to about $100 to put it in your hands direct to the consumer from the mint today.
This then brings us back to the problem mentioned above***:
(end of part 1 of 2)
using bottlecaps to represent, in this case, a liter of water. Or, more specifically, a given quantity of water measured by weight. That's significant because water does expand and contract depending on temperature. That might not sound like much, but the temperatures in colorado are several tens of degrees lower, on average, than those in say, Nevada or Florida or the East Coast in the summertime. This means, first off, you need to have someone with some basic know-how of how to know the value of water based on the temperature of the water, the purity of it (how clean it is), and what volume you have. That will determine the actual value of the water.
...hmm...physical measurements of purity and weight, gee, doesn't that sound a lot like what I was talking about above with the gold and silver coinage? How you had to have someone actually measure that stuff to make sure they weren't getting shortchanged? Are we starting to understand the pattern here?
There's another pattern, too: that damn water is heavy. A single bottlecap is 2.22 grams, but a single liter of water at room temperature is 1,000 grams. But how much weight can you move with cattle? Well we don't have any real-world stats on Brahmin, but an ox can handle about 12,000 pounds (which is about 5,443 kilograms, or 5,443,000 grams). That means that ox can pull 5,443 liters of water or about 2,450,000 bottlecaps. Keep in mind the currency is not the thing of value itself, but a representation of the value of something else, and it's way easier to count bottlecaps than it is to get a mass spectrometer - or in its place, a thermometer (which aren't being made anymore) and a sophisticated water filter (which also isn't being made), in addition to skilled labor (which doesn't exist) - to determine the value of what it is you have. That's not to say anybody will actually move 2.5 million bottlecaps at once because that's asking to be robbed in the wasteland; the metaphor is just there to compare the idea of stores of value.
Through all of this, bear in mind that we're suspending disbelief just a little bit that bottlecaps were the currency of choice because they're supposedly impossible to counterfeit. This is the "fiction" part of the game you're supposed to accept and not argue with, but the rest of it is supposed to have a basis in reality.
With all of that in mind, the bottlecaps are valuable on their own because they cannot be counterfeited, but it technically isn't impossible to replace them with another currency. Good luck getting anyone else on board with your paper money made with your printing press, however, unless they have a way to control it, too. But you'd need a unified national government, or a coalition of governments (like the EU or the CSA) to make that happen. There is, however, a precedent for separate nation-states to use the same currency: the florin. It was gold, sure, but it was also currency used by different countries, and made separately, but to roughly the same standards of purity such that it could be traded across national borders with what was expected to be equivalent value. In other words, this is an analog of the bottlecap in fallout, except that nobody is actually manufacturing the caps anymore but everyone is still using them.
In summary, you thus have a system in Fallout where multiple separate fiefdoms/nation-states are using the same currency, manufactured centuries ago but still in production, not as a thing of value itself but as a store of value used in trade in place of something else by virtue of the currency being significantly easier and safer to exchange and move around than hunks of gold or huge vats of water.
Would this be compatible with mods that change the texture of Pre War money?
caps originaly were the curency to a version of gold reserve, caps only value in fallout 1 was that they represented water backed by the water merchants
in 2 you can find a cash of like 10,000 caps and when you look at it it says this
"These are worthless bottle caps. You've heard that at one time they were used as money, though you suspect its only a story."
Lets say a brahmin is worth 1000 liters of water. If a merchant wants to buy a brahmin but does not want to carry 1000 liters water around he choses a curency which he gives to the brahmin farmer with the garanty that he gets water for it in the Hub whenever he wants. Thats how curreny works. An I.O.U on paper.
Nuka Cola caps are hard to copy without the machinery and ink to print on them. At least at the time Fallout 1 was playing.
"These are worthless bottle caps. You've heard that at one time they were used as money, though you suspect its only a story." they never stook around they relied purely on the water merchants hold of the hub as soon as the ncr stabilised the area they lost power and the cap died
However bottlecaps are also very bad choice for currency speaking realistically:
- How in the world would you carry around more than say 20 of them? And we deal with vendors in hundreds, sometimes thousands
- How would anyone prevent them from being forged? If we have tech to disassemble that useless junk and create tier4 laser weapons (hello science4/gun nut 4/etc) then even without the Institute something as easy as creating the bottlecap out of an aluminum can would be a child-play
- Even if not forged, how to deal with the high amortization rate? Even coins are destroyed with time, not to say fragile bottlecaps
And the list goes on. I wonder what could be the "currency" realistically speaking in such setting - and the currency that is accepted everywhere. One won't be fed by a botltecap of whatever other money you come up with, so it's likely to rollback to just barter.
... immersion mod of the year: "no bottlecaps or other currency in-game"!! Someone please implement it :p
Might be pretty cool.
every fallout game before 3 used a difernt curency based on factions like the now none cannon tactics used brotherhood of steel money
qoute from fallout 2
"These are worthless bottle caps. You've heard that at one time they were used as money, though you suspect its only a story."
fallout 2 the ncr were incharge so you used ncr coins and people beleived the age of using caps was a myth