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.
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?
I think they’re referencing the game Fallout where bottlecaps are used as currency
Because patrolling the Mojave almost makes you wish for a nuclear winter.
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.
Yeah but making them isn’t complicated just medieval smelting is needed which is basically the iron ages
It’s the crimping and the precision shape that’s hard to replicate, you need a press.
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.
I think they’re talking about plastic bottle caps.
The caps in fallout are not plastic they’re soda bottles from the 1960s-80s.
We homebrewers will be the thousandaires of the end times!
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.
Well, for one thing, the supply of googly eyes will run out and you will have to adapt.