I know people out there who have invested a lot in gold under the belief that in the event of like complete societal collapse or hyperinflation, they could use it for purchasing.

I have the hunch it's a scam, but I haven't learned enough monetary theory, business, or economics to understand why.

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[–] 23 points 11 months ago (11 children)

As a person who has an abnormal number of bottlecaps for hobby reasons, thank you for making me feel rich! Also, why would anyone else want these?

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  • [–] 11 points 11 months ago (5 children)

    It's almost certainly a joke but bottlecaps in a post civilization society would make a pretty decent currency, more so than gold.

    They're light, easy to carry, hard to reproduce and therefore scarce. They're also useless for anything else. So if you happened to have a lot of caps laying around they might find their way to becoming a currency.

    Gold is heavy, requires a lot of work to make it useful as a standard, and has other practical uses. Caps are actually better.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago (4 children)

    Yeah but making them isn’t complicated just medieval smelting is needed which is basically the iron ages

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  • [–] 3 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    It's the crimping and the precision shape that's hard to replicate, you need a press.

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  • [–] 4 points 11 months ago

    And that would be doable, realistically. Though there's a bit of plastic on the bottom that would be quite difficult to replicate.

    The point is they're only useful as a currency. And really only to a society that can't really make much. If society advances again to the point where a used bottlecap can be replicated, other systems will already have been established to make it less attractive.

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  • [–] 7 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    We homebrewers will be the thousandaires of the end times!

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  • [–] 6 points 11 months ago

    I mean, considering the fact that numerous pre-modern cultures relied on (diluted) alcohol as their main drink since water was too dirty to drink safely without mixing it in with wine/beer/whatever, and that a lot of people would use alcohol to cope with te hard times that might actually be a good skill to have in the scenario of large amounts of infrastructure becoming unusable. (modern knowledge of germ theory & boiling drinking water would probably make it a lot more useless, but I bet you could find people willing to trade supplies with you for a nice drink.

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