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.
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.