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Anon has seen it all before
(lemmy.nz)
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this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2026
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Tropes exist because they work and who cares what the money is called
The money can’t be any real earth currency, and making up something like florbs would also make people roll their eyes. Credits is fine
no, now that you've said this i want to see a sci-fi movie where all trade is based on the Vietnamese Đồng
Exactly. You've got limited time to tell your story in a movie, so establishing a fake currency that nobody except hardcore numistatics nerds will care about is kinda pointless when everyone already understands that credits = future money.
And as you say using a real currency doesn't make sense in most future movie contexts, and using the "wrong" one may even offend some people who may then boycott your movie - which is obviously not desirable when you're a studio trying to make money.
I image its the same reason for the Gold/Silver currency in many fantasy settings.
"I need a length of rope!"
[Puts down a gold coin worth a month's wages.]
I think that's also because a couple hundred years ago practically every currency was just a certain weight of gold, silver or copper. Different coins were just an easy way to recognize the weight.
Maybe we need to get some numismatics to weigh in here, but I think currency could be extremely tricky depending on where and when you were. I remember reading about medieval Italy and it seemed every city issued its own currency with different denominations, names, and weights. And even then, people would be scraping them to get some precious metals off of them, and with all those different currencies, counterfeiting must have been a real issue.
To apply this Tolkien, the Shire would probably have a different currency than even Bree, though Butterman would even take your coins from Gondor out of politeness to travelers.
They would all have different coins, but the actual value of those coins was determined by their weight, so as long as you could verify that it didn't matter much. Scraping worked because not every salesperson would check the weight of the coins.
Are you spitballing like me or is this your field? Because you'd need to know the percentage of the metal present in the coin to weigh it; gold and silver are too soft be pure. That introduces problems of debasement, a coin from an earlier minting might have a higher content than a later printing, and multiply that by all the different city-states, and you have a potential headache.
It is not my field, so don't take it too serious. But I think I'm those times it was not doable for most people to test metals for purity, so that wouldn't have influenced it much unless it became noticable by eye (or biting)
And for everything else, there is multipass.
I think in Rick and Morty one of the fake currencies is called a schmeckle, which is Yiddish for penis (diminutive).
No, they won't.
Oh, okay
Yeah, I like being thrown into a new world and still somehow understanding the basics of it so it's familiar. No need to name everything differently if that's not the focus of the game.
Credits will do fine
Watto, lul!
Credits are for future and guns, it's coins/pieces of gold/silver when swords.
Somehow I understand completely & agree.
There’s just so many more interesting options. Like what if the worms are their dollars?
what if their dollars are worms?
I think that's super valid for a novel especially, as long as you don't mind that the movie adaptation decides it's not worth taking 10 minutes out of the runtime to explain vs something people will immediately understand
Or maybe there is nothing else interesting in the novel, and it won't matter anyway because no one reads or adapts it
2 strips of gold-pressed latinum for you