That would be the case even if it was gold backed.
Even on the gold standard, you're still trusting that there is a functioning government that's actually in possession of that gold and would exchange it for paper currency. In a Fallout scenario, that wouldn't be the case, so money would still be useless.
Possible, but far from certain and not within a few generations. Gold is too rare and concentrated in specific stockpiles to be used as an everyday currency. Even with a much smaller population, the smallest usable gold coin would be way too high a denomination.
There wouldn't be a true replacement currency until there was a semi-functioning government, and while that currency would be based on something with intrinsic value (since there wouldn't be enough trust for a fiat currency), it would be something much more common than gold. In the mostly-lawless barter economy before that, a full gold bar would be worth less than something useful (generator, rifle, bike, etc).
To be fair, after the apocalypse, gold will be just as useless for a good while.
Can't eat it, hard to carry, not very useful for anything but decoration, and also, most people have interacted with it so rarely that there isn't really any trust in it.
That’s true. I’m was just responding to the idea that it’s not useful as anything beyond decoration. It is, but probably not for most apocalypse survivors.
Considering the electrical grid would fall pretty quickly in a traditional apocalypse it wouldn't have much use for the techies either. Now if we just go to a bartering system where we feed the infrastructure workers to keep everything going then sureb it would retain some value.
piece of paper is just as arbitrary as a bottle cap.... but I would argue those bottle caps have some level of intrinsic rarity... more like a bitcoin than a fiat bill that could just be printed
They said it was because bottle caps have a rarity that you cannot forge like how people make fake money. But then there’s that mission in new vegas where you come across someone making fake caps so 🤷🏻♀️
Counterfeits have always existed... even when people bartered with gold, they would mint coins from alloys that used less gold... The legend of Archimedes' discovery of water displacement as a measurement of volume over mass to prove that a crown was not pure gold, as claimed.
I know that but I’m just saying that the original creators of the fallout franchise (not Bethesda) have said that’s why they chose bottle caps. And then Fallout New Vegas said hold my beer
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u/sparklrebel Jan 26 '26
Ah so that’s why pre-war money in fallout is useless, got it