Editing Setting:Nutopia/Fluff (section)

==Money and Barter==

*put something about new economy and social networks/reputation-based requisition system here*

With a toppled/toppling megacorp no doubt taking a big chunk of virtual currency and oversight out of the system, what are folks using to exchange goods and services in the years ACE?

paper/coin currency seems risky, since I am fairly sure that a meagerly skilled Hiver could pump out plenty of either. Without a huge overarching government/corp entity in the background, securing value seems difficult.

One option would be that most Settlements do a grudging business with notes or coinage or markers from one of the largely intact Unincorporated States. Remember that with the existence of the info-sphere things like the current exchange rates should be easy for everyone to keep track of. 

The Nu-Dollar <-> BancBuc <-> Motorpool Cred exchanges would end up fairly visible though we would probably see a certain shred of profit-taking from the money changers involved, just as today. Expect to see someone expressing a preference in their pay, picking Motorpool Creds because they want to do some business out that way, or demanding a few more percentage points worth of Nu-Dollars because "damn gougers cut you more and more every year with their fees and I got 'nuff bills to pay already"

A heavier, literally, medium of exchange would be raw materials. Sure, with enough time and juice and spares, you can tickle a cloud of nanites into separating that pile of rusty scrap into ingots of component elements.. but a five-kilo block of pure, really pure copper from the mines up in highlands (they finally got them open again, its amazing.. heard something about badgers, believe it or not) would represent a reliable time and energy saving factor that would go beyond mere material worth. Could be the same thing with many products:

*Refined-Carbon rods, pure and ready to drop into the Forge of your choice. Salvage from a Corp' building site, perhaps.

*Gold. the Original shiny-thing. Some people still horde the stuff like it was going out of style, everyone else values it for its chemical/electrical properties.. and shininess. Everything from the meager ingots produced in massive automated pit mining arrays to ancient coins 'liberated' from the vaults of Corporate Officers after they, um, didn't need them anymore. 

*Radioactive Materials. Sure, exotic materials have a lingering bad name from some of the.. ah.. Unfortunate events of the War, but there is still a need. The would be a large and somewhat dangerous category, ranging from the molded uranium or plutonium from weapons captured still in their cradles to tiny amounts of the vast category of transoceanic elements for exotic applications. As a whole these are one of the hardest to handle, able to burn out half the tech in your bloodstream if you look at it funny.