Can we have a "Why do people in FO4 use Bottlecaps as a currency" rant thread...

I still like the way Shady Sands became NCR.

Yes it does. The function of gold is just the same as that of central bank's guarantee; to provide a a proof of the ability to repay.

(You)

Wouldn't everything just be bartering?

Because it's a small piece of metal without radiation contamination that's worth about its material value as a currency?

I thought that it had to do with the fact that the soda machines keep getting stocked, and hence there is a type of printing press to ensure bottle caps can be replaced as the are degraded like normal coins

>Implying shiny metal makes even more sense
>b-b-but it's rare!

Bartering implies that there is a common currency that is just momentarily lacking. It is mostly a feature in money-as-commodity starved economies.

Ill never understand economics. Ill just accept we use paper money and leave it at that. The entire why of it completely goes over my head.

So why wouldn't you melt down the caps in order to make practical resources? I know you couldn't just make bullets out of them, but you could still make tools.

The people on the East Coast got too much radiation and are too retarded to do anything other than squat in their shacks all day doing nothing.

And trust-free economies, actually.

The whole barter myth notwithstanding even most actual primitive credit-centric economies rely on barter or makeshift "currency" when trading outside of the network of trust (far-off villages, etc).

In fact gold was probably adopted by most ruling structure specifically for this reason; traveling soldiers need to be fed, and the only way to secure them food when they're in a land outside their own trust network is something which can be bartered for it.

Because everyone says it has value. If for some reason literally everyone decided that paper money wasn't good anymore, then it wouldn't.

Why can't you make counterfeit caps out of the scrap lying around?

But why is gold inherently valuable?

I want you to make a bottlecap right now

Did you just never watch School House Rock?

youtube.com/watch?v=J7hNOt2Y0J8

Bills and coins are smarter, but it all started out with barter.

People with excess find it alluring.

How hard is that gonna be to paint the little logos and shit on them per cap?

They use bottlecaps as currency because they're aluminium, so are resistant to corrosion, hard to forge, are light, there's a decent amount of them around and there's a limited supply of them to prevent inflation.

Contraptions DLC lets you build machines so build one that manufactures bottlecaps.

/board

Relatively rare, useless for weaponmaking, looks pretty.

All modern currency is guaranteed by a government to be worth a certain amount. Money in itself has no inherent value; it's all just a system where everyone has agreed that all things have a worth that can be quantified and as such, money can be used to facilitate an easier medium of exchange.

Fallout's system is actually fairly straightforward, as it doesn't have 7000-ish years of real-world history to sift through. Before the start of Fallout 1, water was one of the most valuable resources in one of the first areas to recover from the war. As carrying fuckloads of water around is REALLY difficult, people started to agree to instead use a token that was worth a certain quantity of water, when exchanged.

Bottlecaps were small, lightweight, durable, had little value for anything else and as the bottling plants were all offline, were fairly proof against counterfeit and inflation, as no-one was going to be making many more. Sure, people might find treasure troves of them, but the proto-economy could survive small shocks like that. Plus, one cap meant one bottle (of water) making it a straightforward exchange. Over time, as more caps entered the system, the value of a single cap depreciated until we reach their modern value.

Given The Hub and its surroundings were one of the first areas to establish an economy, the idea of their currency and its use spread, especially as soda was so popular in pre-war America, that the caps could be found across the country. Hence why they're still used in the Commonwealth and Capitol Wasteland. Especially in DC, they had similar problems with access to drinkable water, as in the pre-NCR West Coast.

Simple, you see?

Why is something that is rare automatically worth something? There still has to be demand for it.

It isn't. However, from a logistical point of view, its almost always the most ideal element for the creation of currency. On average, the lack of competing elements aside from Silver. Gold wasn't hot shit initially around the world, but rather in Europe - in other parts of world, the ratio between gold and silver deposits usually meant that the more abundant one was commonly used and the less abundant one was reserved for foreign trading.

>literally nobody on this thread met the scammer in FO4 that posed the exact same question

Well, in the modern era it's tangibly useful in electronics and other complex industrial products, but there's a lot of reasons why early cultures adopted gold.

For one, it's aesthetically pleasing. It's shiny.

For two, it was (at the time) essentially useless for use as a tool. Gold is soft. So when you were mining copper or whatever, you occasionally ended up with some shiny, essentially useless metal.

For three, it was rare. The fact it had a relatively limited supply pretty much everywhere people went meant it was a lot more stable than using shells (which are infinite and easy to collect) or metals like copper (which are more useful as tools than luxuries).

For four, it was the best possible currency, because unlike other metals, it didn't rust or tarnish. It was always good, so you could hold onto it for whenever you needed to buy something.

Ultimately, however, these factors only tie into the biggest factor - value is subjective. It is determined solely by people, to suit their needs. To say that it is "inherently" valuable' isn't necessarily true, but its properties listed above make it effective as a form of currency to pretty much all cultures, so all of them recognized early on that this shiny metal shit they dug out of the ground is valuable (read: is useful) somehow.

Basically, it's valuable because if someone hands you a bag full of gold coins for a horse, you can be pretty sure you can use this bag of gold coins to buy bread from another person, who is pretty sure they can use those coins to buy wood from another guy, and so on.

>Simple, you see?

No. Why would the people of the Commonwealth use Bottlecaps? They have plentiful of water by themselves and nobody pushed a bottlecap-economy onto them like the water merchants did in FO1.

>It does not make sense!
>Fuck Bethesda you stupid cunts
You just answered your own question. Bethesda is bunch of stupid cunts, so they have no problem putting things in their games that seem cool, but ultimately make little sense.

Because there's trade caravans between Boston and the Capital Wasteland.

>they're aluminum

Do they specifically say this in game? Because most real life bottle caps are made of steel.

Because Bethesda was making a Fallout game and for them Fallout game has to hit some critical points: Brotherhood of Steel, powered armours, ghouls, mutants, 50s aesthetics, bottlecaps, gore.

In itself it isn't worth much, but the rarity makes it good as a token for trading. That's the whole point of a currency.

Compare to a more common material that is useful - say wood. Suddenly you just have to pick up branches on the floor to get richer. Inflation goes way high, even if people might want wood for its own sake.

You're right, my bad. They're made of steel.

Trade. DC had water shortages and you can bet your ass other people did before the fallout settled. Add to that, organisations like the Crimson Caravan have wide-ranging networks. Caps are light, portable, resistant to damage and inflation and hard to counterfeit, so in lieu of any government-backed guarantee, rad and contaminant-free water is still valuable. Why do you think you have to build wells in Sanctuary, rather than letting them drink from the river?

Naturally, outside areas such as DC and the NCR, clean water is going to be easier to find, hence why the value of it is depreciated somewhat, but it is still a valued resource. It's likely that cap-based economies sprung up in a handful of small areas first, then connected as trade expanded. As the isolated systems became unified, the value of water and hence, a single cap, became a little more normalised, resulting in the value we have today.

>Why would the people of the Commonwealth use Bottlecaps?

Because Bethesda knows that bottle caps are iconic to the franchise, and they would lose a marketing strategy not to use them, so they did. Even though Fallout 2 and New Vegas show that other currencies exist outside of the time and place where the bottle caps had an explanation written for them.

Just like how they make the protagonist a Vault Dweller, because that's iconic to the franchise. Even though Fallout 2 and New Vegas had protagonists that weren't vault dwellers.

Bethesda Fallout is a theme park of the Fallout setting. Just like how you do not question why you use tickets to buy prizes, you do not question why you use bottle caps to buy items.

That's bullshit and you know it. The demand for trade caravan's goods was never big enough to create the big demand for bottlecaps in the Commonwealth given that the trade caravan's goods are rather homogenous in nature. Like what does the Commonwealth not have what the Capital Wasteland have?

>Even though Fallout 2 and New Vegas had protagonists that weren't vault dwellers.
2 protagonist was a descendent of the vault dweller, so it's close enough.

Bethesda is stupid and lazy and doesnt want to figure out a new currency system that would make sense for different settings in the fallout world.

Unlike New Vegas which had three forms of currency.

There's no close enough, either they lived in a vault or they didn't.

The institute should use their own scrip. Why are they trading in caps?

I'm fine with the surface using caps.

Try thinking of gold like any other luxury commodity. Why does jewelry exist? Because people think it looks nice, and they look nice when they wear it. Jewelry is valuable, even though it serves no real purpose.

You can say that the demand is from people wanting to wear it, but is that really any different from people wanting gold just to have it?

Gold is essentially luxury abstracted to the most basic concept - valuable pointlessness. For one reason or another, people will want, so it is valuable, despite not being useful. And therefore the only real use for it (unless you're going to wear, which is just a show of wealth), is to exchange it for something useful.

Maybe because it would add in an unnecessary flavor currency which is completely redundant because institute has surface missions for the synths, which would be given caps to use?

The funny bit for me is why is the main character collecting bottlecaps? I didn't run into a trader that used them for a while when I played Fallout 4 because I spent a while up in the top left corner of the map screwing around.

>Unlike New Vegas which had three forms of currency

But which also had this ugly Wild-West setting. It literally makes no sense for anybody in a post apocalyptic "I will die the next minute"-world to spend time decorating shit, especially not in a wild west way or by using Clarendon/Italienne on everything.

I am disgusted by New Vegas and never played it because of it's overabundant use of Italienne-fonts.

>why is the main character collecting bottlecaps?
Why are YOU collecting bottlecaps?

And ACKCHYUALLY the F3 protag was a wastelander who was snuck into the Vault as a baby.

Vault Dweller means you lived in a vault. Chosen One being the Dweller's descendant just connects the stories, it doesn't make them a Vault Dweller.

My ancestors lived on military bases. Does that make me a soldier?

New Vegas took place on the westcoast 200 years after the war. They've been rebuilding society for decades.

Good point.

Your ancestors lived in America before war, does that make you a true American?

>in a post apocalyptic

New Vegas is post-post apocalyptic. It is no longer entirely about living in a radioactive hellhole near death. The NCR is a fully-fledged republic with taxes and running water and electricity.

The Mojave is only dangerous because it is the frontier. People can live in relative safety, just like the pioneers could live in relative safety, at least enough to fucking decorate their homes.

The font is ugly but that doesn't mean the setting is at fault.

Also, using three forms of currency is pretty much the epitome of how shit would work on the frontier. You could be carrying around a fistful of dollars, a bag of pesos, and fucking gold nuggets. And you would, because it's entirely possible the bank could be robbed and the whole of law and order is six goddamn men.

There's no america anymore, dumbass

What if I have ancestors irl who lived in America before colonization?

Does that make me native American?

My ancestors lived in Africa before they were homo sapiens, does that make me a goddamn monkey?

>life is dangerous, that means you shouldn't take 1 hour of your life to dust out your dwelling and maybe make it look comfy and relatively healthy to live in
Well gee a car can hit me any second now so I better let my home just fall apart, don't bother cleaning anything either.

TRIGGERED

I hate walking into any settlement in Fallout in any game and see garbage lying around.

It's been 200 years, clean your house up goddammit.

Yes.
>believing in the "out of Africa" meme

Oh yes, so the people of Diamond City with it's piles of dirt and random bricks on the street are just lazy, right?

Do you not believe that homo habilis did not live in Africa?

I spent like an hour cleaning up all the garbage around Sanctuary in 4 and making it tidy before I left.

I like the way the map designers either design settlements to be fucking filthy that look uninhabited, which is usually the opposite case, or they look completely sterile, as if no humans lived there at all.

You enter a room and you either see it full of rubble and trash and other shit, or you see it sterile, clean with absolutely no discarded cans of food or bottles of booze lying around waiting to be trashed.

It's neanderthals that matter, which blacks have very little to no genes of.

He might be referring to the theory that humans came out of Asia.

Or the idea that different sub groups became different races? I know for sure Australian abbos are not the same as most modern humans.

You mean the species that was outfucked into extinction by homo sapiens, and were less intelligent?

>believing the "neanderthals are ancestral white people" meme

Not ancestors but there was interbreeding between the two species.

Shit, collecting huge amounts of bottlecaps sounds cool. But I never drink anything other than water in plastic bottles.

Neanderthals actually raped themselves out of existence by raping homo sapiens women.

The dangers of racemixing were not well known back then.

I doubt abbos could even count as human.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Australian_inventions#Aboriginal_technology_.E2.80.93_before_1788

the concept of using bottlecaps when real money could still be found pretty easily never made snese at all since 1.
Heck. All those hundreds of poeple you meet who grew up outside the vault and the ghouls along with them use caps. Why would they just decide to use caps?

>tfw you often forget they can even speak

I wonder how their mind works.

it would have made much more sense for Boston to use their own regional currency. Maybe subway tokens or something.

>Lightweight, nondivisible, readily identifiable and extremely difficult to manufacture post-apocalypse
how is money any different

The games should have focused more on bartering.

1-2 kinda did it but it still had the caps/money aspect to it as well that made it a bit redundant.

It's a shame almost no games do it.

What do you expect, anyone there before that time was either a savage, Dutch or French. Thank God the English colonised it, otherwise it'd be even worse today.

>Neanderthals actually raped themselves out of existence by raping homo sapiens women

Yeah, I'm sure the manlet less intelligent neanderthals were the rapists.

But hey, think of it this way - maybe the blacks will rape themselves out of existence too.

>Ugly wild west setting
>I didn't play the best Fallout game in existence because I don't like the font.

...

They're connected to the dreamtime. Why bother even evolving if you'll just end up part of the dreaming anyway when you die?

>It literally makes no sense for anybody in a post apocalyptic "I will die the next minute"-world to spend time decorating shit

people will always attempt to look better than the person next to them no matter the environment e.g. skins in csgo

>use their own regional currency

They could've used baseball cards, and thought the numbers of the players meant their denominations.

Could've also been a cool parallel to American dollars. To the survivors of the apocalypse, the men on the cards are just as dead as the presidents - if the presidents were important to be copied onto paper, surely these men must have been just as important.

I love that he thinks that "talking mutants" are fantasy creatures.

>Dude the guy with webbed toes is talking it's clearly a fantasy world don't think about shit

>baseball cards
there's only a finite amount of those. plus people from Vaults would know what baseball is.

Who was in the wrong here?

A better question is, "What do they eat?", and lets also discuss the shandification of New Vegas.

So... This is the twisted life cycle of Cred Forums

One shit thread spawns others, like cancerous offshoots of the original disease... It'd be fascinating, if it wasn't so disgusting.

then make a thread about something you want to talk about

>Eddie
I can not believe that quest was played straight. When Valentine told me the story, I was convinced that guy had to be dead or a feral in the bunker. There's no way that he's still fully cognizant and sitting in that bunker, right? But he was.

I was so fucking surprised by it.
Like it's the most retarded fucking thing, he just sits in a bunker doing nothing for 200 years and this is the conclusion to a quest.
He's not dead, there's no moment of realization that Valentine's been chasing a dead man for centuries to avenge a dead man's girl, he's just there completely fine and alive.
What the fuck, Bethesda, I can write a better character arc in one post than you can in an oversized questline.