I assume this is some kind of meme that I am unfamiliar with? please explain it to me.What's going on in this thread?
Why is Money Energy?
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That's Nwadabuke Morgan, the energy/money-focused leader of Morgan Industries from the game Alpha Centauri.
Undoubtedly he is fetching his nerve stapler.
Undoubtedly he is fetching his nerve stapler.
It's exactly like the gold standard works: in the gold standard the gold stays in its vaults, on the energy standard people keep directing energy wherever it goes. It's just that when you make it the standard, your currency may be redeemed for whatever it's based on. In the case of gold every dollar could be exchanged for a fixed amount of gold at the bank, so on an energy standard any power exchange would have to let me pay for one specified unit of energy with one specified unit of currency.
I tend to think of it like this: we need funds to keep the lights on. A super advanced space age interstellar empire has a loooooooot of lights... so funds and energy it buys to keep the lights on may as well equate.
It's rational and advanced. Or rational-seeming and advanced-seeming at least, which is what sci-fi is all about. You've got this really broad physical concept of "work" which covers a lot of the useful things you might want to do, and to do work you need energy. In fact, if you want to effect any change in physics or chemistry, energy comes up again and again.
Stellaris in particular is an amalgam of sci-fi tropes. I wouldn't look for facts here, as the reason is usually; that's what's in sci-fi media.
That said...
Like most economies Stellaris has a currency, the Energy Credit. Which I presume would function at least similarly to a modern currency. I figure it works like the Gold Standard. Every energy credit is backed by the per month power generation of the empire, with other factors such as minerals, transport, and time factored into their value. The Credit would be transferred digitally and carried on some sort of digital storage and/or mundane physical representation. In such a system I'd imagine the Dyson Sphere would have the same role as Fort Knox or other gold depository. Insurance that your Energy Credit is secure.
I imagine the primary driving force of such an economy to be Time rather than scarcity. You're paying for priority, you're not paying for IF you'll receive a good or service, but when.
That said...
Like most economies Stellaris has a currency, the Energy Credit. Which I presume would function at least similarly to a modern currency. I figure it works like the Gold Standard. Every energy credit is backed by the per month power generation of the empire, with other factors such as minerals, transport, and time factored into their value. The Credit would be transferred digitally and carried on some sort of digital storage and/or mundane physical representation. In such a system I'd imagine the Dyson Sphere would have the same role as Fort Knox or other gold depository. Insurance that your Energy Credit is secure.
I imagine the primary driving force of such an economy to be Time rather than scarcity. You're paying for priority, you're not paying for IF you'll receive a good or service, but when.
Wow... you better go play SMAC before Chairman Yang finds out you haven't yet!
Usurper Judaa Marr said:
Now, answer me this: who are you to contradict Usurper Judaa Marr? Hmmm?
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Does this not look like a motherfucker who knows his way around post-currency economics?
I will answer for you: yes, yes it does.
/thread
It works the same way sending money does.
If you include storage technology like Graphene Supercapacitors exchange should not be too hard. The example of exchanging material with high energy potential (Uranium, Hydrogen) has also been mentioned.
The whole point of a currency being backed by something is that you don't have to move that "something" around. Money is kind of like exchanging stocks of said currency/the backed good.
Actually there was this one example in Star Trek: Enterprise with the Automated Repairyard. Where teh ship just "payed" for the repairs using Warp-Plasma, among other things.
I think I see where OP is coming from, though. You could have just as easily called it "credits" and move on. Regardless, it's currency and should be treated as such.
It's true that the world economy was based on precious metals back in the day it is not the case in the present day. The world economy today is its own entity.
I did not expect this thread and the thread I made about how much a pop is to blow up this much.
That's okay, my thread discussing the numbers and mechanics for Unrest and consumer goods is currently an argument about libertarian principles. These kinds of things just happen sometimes.
Note that it says energy-backed currency
. They probably trade like we do, but their currency, be it 0s and 1s in some online banking system or pieces of paper, metal or something else, is backed by energy and energy production, the same way paper bills can be backed by, for example, gold.Fond memories of the thread I stumbled over on the Dwarf Fortress forums discussing how big a single tile was in metres.
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In the future, everything runs on batteries and things are so advanced that they run through those batteries pretty quick. So since everybody carried spare batteries and since people were spending most of their income on batteries anyway, it just made sense to skip a step and make batteries legal tender.
The picture could have used a one of these.
Energy is the currency of the future.
- CEO Nwabudike Morgan, "The Centauri Monopoly"
Planet's Primary, Alpha Centauri A, blasts unimaginable quantities of energy into space each instant, and virtually every joule of it is wasted entirely. Incomprehensible riches can be ours if we can but stretch our arms wide enough to dip from this eternal river of wealth.
- CEO Nwabudike Morgan, "The Centauri Monopoly"
Life is merely an orderly decay of energy states, and survival requires the continual discovery of new energy to pump into the system. He who controls the sources of energy controls the means of survival.
- CEO Nwabudike Morgan, "The Centauri Monopoly"
And when at last it is time for the transition from megacorporation to planetary government, from entrepreneur to emperor, it is then that the true genius of our strategy shall become apparent, for energy is the lifeblood of this society and when the chips are down he who controls the energy supply controls Planet. In former times the energy monopoly was called "The Power Company"; we intend to give this name an entirely new meaning.
- CEO Nwabudike Morgan "The Centauri Monopoly"
I don't think that energy in this game = money, and it doesn't make sense to just rename energy to money just because energy is treated like a currency.
That said, it is definitely awkward and I think it would make an awful lot of sense to differentiate between currency and energy in Stellaris.
The simple reason is this; currency can be based on something like energy, but energy can't be generated by currency alone. In theory, in Stellaris you could 'power' a civilization with 'currency.' The only reason this is difficult in the game is that most energy producing options are actually producing energy. 'Money' generating options are relatively scarce. But it is still mechanically possible to have an empire which does not produce actual energy, and yet operates as if it does.
It makes a lot of sense to base the value of currency on energy (for reasons that have been well explained already), but whether or not you have currency is a legitimate question. An economy using currency based on the gold standard, for example, does not operate entirely on the production and exchange of gold. It only determines the value of currency, or put another way, how much currency it might cost to exchange for a set amount of gold. In order to generate currency (of any value) you still must generate it through trade, taxation, etc.
I don't think it makes a lot of sense to build an economy on the trade value of energy and then remove currency from the equation. It removes a lot of interesting options for diplomacy, trade, economic management, and building. It is an unnecessary oversimplification that might have made the game easier to balance for the purpose of launching the game, but going forward I am genuinely hoping that the economy becomes more complex, rather than doubling down in the mineral/energy dichotomy we have.
Edit: Obviously there remains the possibility of societies without currency. But I think that even in a situation where a society has a post-scarcity economy and does not utilize currency in day-to-day interactions, in order for that civilization to conduct meaningful inter-empire trade, some form of currency would need to exist.
That said, it is definitely awkward and I think it would make an awful lot of sense to differentiate between currency and energy in Stellaris.
The simple reason is this; currency can be based on something like energy, but energy can't be generated by currency alone. In theory, in Stellaris you could 'power' a civilization with 'currency.' The only reason this is difficult in the game is that most energy producing options are actually producing energy. 'Money' generating options are relatively scarce. But it is still mechanically possible to have an empire which does not produce actual energy, and yet operates as if it does.
It makes a lot of sense to base the value of currency on energy (for reasons that have been well explained already), but whether or not you have currency is a legitimate question. An economy using currency based on the gold standard, for example, does not operate entirely on the production and exchange of gold. It only determines the value of currency, or put another way, how much currency it might cost to exchange for a set amount of gold. In order to generate currency (of any value) you still must generate it through trade, taxation, etc.
I don't think it makes a lot of sense to build an economy on the trade value of energy and then remove currency from the equation. It removes a lot of interesting options for diplomacy, trade, economic management, and building. It is an unnecessary oversimplification that might have made the game easier to balance for the purpose of launching the game, but going forward I am genuinely hoping that the economy becomes more complex, rather than doubling down in the mineral/energy dichotomy we have.
Edit: Obviously there remains the possibility of societies without currency. But I think that even in a situation where a society has a post-scarcity economy and does not utilize currency in day-to-day interactions, in order for that civilization to conduct meaningful inter-empire trade, some form of currency would need to exist.
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Sid Meiers Alpha Centauri.
The "Sid Meiers Alpha Centauri Planetary Pack" is probably your best bet nowadays.