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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[–] 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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