This is RPG-ology #90: Cash, for May 2025.
Our thanks to Regis Pannier and the team at the Places to Go, People to Be French edition for locating a copy of this and a number of other lost Game Ideas Unlimited articles. This was originally Game Ideas Unlimited: Cash, and is reposted here with minor editing [bracketed].
One thing most of our adventure games seem to have in common is money. Oh, it takes different forms, but it’s nearly always present. In some ways it seems to be the means of keeping score. But this strange stuff we call cash has not been the stuff we know for very long, and is already changing into something else. If we take a look at the forms money has taken over time it may help us better work out what sort of funds our characters have–and how that changes aspects of their world.
As I write this, there is an underground economy burgeoning in Argentina. A paper called the creditos (I do not know if that is the correct spelling) is overtaking the pesos in importance. The people–even the media–are calling this a barter economy, but that’s not what it is. It is the evolution of a competitive currency, cash of a different kind, backed by private non-government interests. It isn’t even something new–but we’ll get to that.
Barter, of course, is a basic concept of economics. I want what you have, I have what you want, and we agree that I’ll give you so much of what I have for so much of what you have, and we are happy. If what I have happens to be bread and what you have is caviar, you can probably get a lot of bread for a little caviar–because even if I don’t want your caviar, there will be others who do, who are willing to trade more than just a little bread for it. But barter has its complications. I have brought my cheeses with me to market today, to trade for cloth to make clothes; but the weaver doesn’t need cheese this week, and wishes I had brought my eggs. Perhaps he could take my cheese for his cloth and trade it for eggs–but then, people who have eggs are more likely to want cloth than cheese, so unless I’m willing to give him a lot of cheese for his cloth he probably won’t deal with me. I should have brought my eggs. Who knew?
Money is the answer to this problem. It is merely a barter item, something everyone agrees has value, that is easier to carry around than an entire stock of goods. Now I sell my cheese for a few shekels, and use the shekels, which the weaver can use to buy eggs, to buy cloth.
But to convince people to use money, it had to have value. Thus the shekel was made of precious metal. It wasn’t valuable because it was a coin, but rather because it was a gold (or silver) coin; and its value wasn’t something stamped on its face, but it was literally worth its weight in gold.
Since its value was dependent on its weight, merchants had scales. The balance scale that you see in the hand of Blind Justice is just the sort of scale that was used. I, the merchant, put my weight on one side; you, the buyer, put your shekels in the other tray until the scale was balanced, and then you had met my price. The shekel, in fact, was not originally a coin but a unit of weight (measured as mass, but no one then knew the difference). It was convenient to have one-shekel coins, but what mattered was whether you put three shekels of gold, or silver, in the pan.
Because the weight of the shekel was standardized but the weight of the coins varied, you could never be certain whether your coins had the right weight. This gave unscrupulous merchants an opportunity to cheat. Many had two sets of weights–one the weight of shekels when you had to pay them, the other the weight of shekels when they had to pay you.
The solution to this was certified coinage. In Rome, a denarius was a carefully weighed bit of precious metal stamped with the emperor’s picture on one side and another image on the reverse. These stamps were difficult to duplicate in that age, and so a denarius was trusted to have the correct weight. It was now possible to pay a merchant without worrying about whether his scales were correct.
But if you were cheap, you could shave a few cents–quite literally. Early coins were subject to chiseling. Chiselers would shave the edges of each coin, making them just a bit lighter without disturbing the seals on the faces. The seller would then receive certified coins which were not actually worth what they claimed, while the buyer pocketed the difference. This led to those ridges which you see on the edges of American quarters, dimes, half-dollars, and the old silver dollars–a throwback to when they were made of real precious metal (which was [less than forty about sixty] years ago). The new dollar coins don’t have these because they were never made of anything valuable. Despite the hype about the Sakajawea gold dollar, there is no gold in it at all. It’s not even gold plated. But again, we’re not there yet. There’s a similar reason why nickels and pennies are not so scored, but we’ll get to that, too.
Along the way, the Spanish decided to take advantage of the fact that the coin was made of something of value, and developed the doubloon. This gold coin was minted with break points. You could break it in half, and in half again, and in half again. This earned them the nickname pieces of eight, because you could easily break one coin into eight equal pieces. Each of the pieces was known as a bit, which is why a quarter of a dollar is known as two bits. This is also where the concept of making change originated. You made change by changing the whole doubloon into bits and giving some of the bits back to the buyer. Prior to this, it wasn’t change and you didn’t make it.
However, if you were particularly wealthy, carrying all that real money around with you was difficult–particularly if you were involved in major transactions, such as land purchases. Money could be stolen; and even if you protected it well, it was terribly heavy. So banks (which existed almost as long as there has been money) created paper money. No, governments did not do it first. As recently as the time of Thomas Jefferson, there were banks in America printing their own money. But it didn’t start as money. It started as letters of credit. A letter of credit was a statement by a bank that they had your money, and would back any cheque written by you up to a stated amount. Don’t you wish you had one of those when you were at the mall sometimes? The money would change hands through your endorsement on a cheque, which the seller could take to the bank to claim the stated portion of your gold and silver, usually to be transferred to his bank, or even merely to his account in the same bank. Thus your money was safe unless you could be tricked or forced to sign legal papers parting with it (more than a highwayman could manage), and you were still free to spend it.
But banks went beyond this. They began producing negotiable letters of credit–bits of paper which certified that the bank would pay, on demand, a quantity of real money as stated on the face of the paper. This meant gold and silver in the bank’s vault to back every dollar printed. Governments got into the act as well, so there were often several types of money in circulation. This could be confusing, as you were never quite certain what merchants would accept which money, or whether the particular bill offered you by a buyer was indeed genuine. Different bank and government bills could be different colors, different designs, different denominations; they were never entirely standardized. In the United States, George Washington quickly became the favorite for the one dollar bill, and Thomas Jefferson for the two. The three dollar bill sported many different faces, but the most popular image for it was Santa Claus.
This is the situation in Argentina today. The pesos is collapsing faster than the government can overprint it, and people are afraid to use it. A barter economy began to develop, goods for goods, through street fairs; but to simplify the trading, as the fairs became better established they started issuing the creditos, printed papers which stated that the holder had traded goods into the system and was entitled to receive goods out of the system in trade. As it developed, people began selling their services for creditos. Each fair had different designs, but many began honoring each other’s bills. Merchants outside the fairs began accepting these in trade for goods and services. A private regulatory body was created by the fairs to restrict quantities (preventing inflation) and detect counterfeiting. The government’s money failed, so business created its own money.
In the latter half of the last century, money took a different turn. Quarters and dimes, once real money because they were made of silver, could not be made for what they were worth; inflation in the prices of gold and silver was making it very difficult to maintain any sensible price of bread against the value of money. So the connection was cut. Dollars were no longer worth a fixed amount of gold in Fort Knox; silver certificates were no longer issued; silver coins were made of copper, thinly plated with silver for appearance. Interestingly, the coins which are no longer real money are still distinguished in law from those which never were. Nickels and pennies are not, by law, money. They are change. What’s the difference? Have you ever gone to pay for something will a handful of pennies? Guess what: the merchant does not have to take them, because they are not money. No one has to accept nickels and pennies in amounts in excess of about seventeen or eighteen cents. This is historically because the coins are worthless, given value only by convention. Today, all money has value by convention–it is worth something merely because we all agree that it is. And perhaps it is starting to fade from the world.
Credit has been with us in one form or another all along. In essence, having credit means that that you’re worth money which you don’t happen to have at the moment. If I put a thousand dollars in the bank, I’ve got a thousand dollars credited to my name at that bank. If I borrow a thousand dollars from that bank, I’ve been credited one thousand dollars in the expectation that I’ll pay it back. The interesting thing is that if I do both of those things, I have the same thousand dollars twice. I have it because the bank’s records say it’s mine; and I have it because they gave it to me. I’ve doubled my money. I’ve got two thousand–the thousand I put in the bank and the thousand the bank gave me–even if the bank gave me my same thousand that I deposited. Sure, I owe them a thousand with interest; they also owe me a thousand with interest. The bank has the thousand I gave them, and the thousand I owe them, so they also have two thousand dollars. So when I gave the bank a thousand and they gave it back, we each wound up with two thousand, or four thousand altogether. Credit multiplies the amount of money available, because every dollar can be owned completely by several different people at the same time, possibly more than once. Sophistry? In one sense, it is. But it’s very real sophistry. If my bank goes to another bank for a loan, it can show as its assets both the thousand dollars I have on deposit and the thousand dollars I owe. If I go to do something with the money, I can similarly show a thousand dollars in hand and another thousand in the bank. So credit does incredible things to the money supply. And if you remember that the problem in Argentina is that the government is quite happy to print more money than can be backed by goods and services in the country, you begin to see why the government here is interested in fixing interest rates to control how much money there is.
But the existence of credit is starting to make money superfluous. I remember when I was in high school I explained to my father that in the future there would be cards that would enable us to pay for things directly from our bank accounts. His reaction was that no one would want such a thing, since they were a step backward from what we already had–that he could buy things with his cards which he could choose to pay for out of the next paycheck. Today I have such a card. Payments made to me by Gaming Outpost are electronically transferred through PayPal from their account to mine, and from there to my bank account. My wife could have her check automatically deposited in her bank account (she doesn’t but she wants to change that for convenience). My card is accepted at all of the grocery stores and gas stations I use; several fast food restaurants and pizza places and all eateries of at least the level of diner will take it. I can use it at the drug store for odds and ends around the clock. Even the local convenience store takes it. I rarely need cash. I hate it–it’s too easy to spend. Like a friend of mine [twenty forty] years back said of food stamps, it’s not like it’s money. But it is the future. Great effort was invested in making a new crop of U.S. bills which would be difficult to counterfeit. A large part of this went into improving the paper. Embedded strips and images were added. Counterfeiters found a way to dupe most of the people most of the time: they bleached fives and printed fifties over them. Sure, you can tell if you read the microprint in the strips–but who looks? The technology to copy money is keeping pace with the technology to print it. No currency is impossible to duplicate. It will almost certainly be phased out.
Thereafter, money will be something that exists only in the system. The credits you have will be recorded in your account; even the paper boy will be paid that way, probably by an automatic debit system each week. Already many of us pay our Internet access that way (is there anyone who does not do so anymore, or was I the last holdout on that?). Cash will have no value. But money will survive.
[Next week, something different.]
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Next article: Shares.