You're overthinking things. On the gold standard, banks are designed so they can hold a certain amount of gold. On the energy standard, energy transfer stations would be setup to accept currency for energy.
That doesn't really address my points. How do I pump energy into these hypothetical stations? What forms of energy are acceptable? It's kind of like having matter as your standard--there's so much of it, and so many kinds, that it just doesn't make sense. What energy is tied to credits and what energy is not, and how do you regulate and enforce that? How do I collect my one one hundred kilojoules--how does the average joe handle the energy he or she transfers their currency into, especially given that futuristic technology would likely lead to dealing with massive amounts of it? I joke about bombs and ferrets, but only because the question is so problematic that those options are as (un)reasonable as any. And this is just the tip of the iceberg--if energy is equivalent to gold under the gold standard, does that mean I could horde old car batteries and cash their charge in for currency when the exchange rate is favorable like one might do with jewelry under a gold standard economy? I can go on and on.
One part is the complexity of simulating currencies.
And if I had enough money during Goldstandart times, I could have literally bought a Mountain worth of Gold. How would that have worked? It is not like my local bank has a mountain worth of Gold in thier Vaults to begin with.
Ah, but you're missing the fact that energy is far, far more common even in our present society compared to gold. Factor in exponential growth in production due to things like fusion reactors becoming commonplace, and the energy of a nuclear bomb might well be worth something like a couple American cents, not whatever a mountain of gold would be worth. Y'all gotta get off this gold standard thing--it really, really doesn't translate.
Why does it not translate? The only question is "how much value can you squeeze in how small a space and weight"?
What you note about aluminum goes against the feasibility of an energy standard--as you say, what is valuable can be made increasingly less valuable with technology, and this is especially true of energy in Stellaris. I mentioned this earlier, so try rereading my posts--you don't seem to be addressing my points.
Increasing energy density does not change a thing. Just how much power a single unit of "energy credits" represents. And how effective the storage medium needs to be.
Well yeah, that's a huge part of my point. You seem to acknowledge the amount of energy required for FTL travel (by any means), or to propel a battleship at sublight speeds, or for use in who knows how many other technologies such a society would have, most of which are abstracted out of the game. It would be vast. Mind-boggling. One energy credit, by nature of how much energy would be available to such a society, would have to have enormous to reflect that abundance. Yet at the same time, because energy would be so abundant, as a standard, it would, like aluminum, grossly depreciate in value. I could probably buy a Coke for the energy equivalent of many tons of dynamite, or more, which itself is a problem--the bottle of Coke does not require that much energy to make, and yet because the standard is something so common, it is now worth less than itself. Gold gets around this issue by being much scarcer and not having literally (and in multiple senses) universal use and value, but this is not so for energy.
I don't have the same interest in storage mediums that many people in this discussion do. It seems profoundly dangerous for the average person to to be able to store several Hiroshimas in their wallet, which would be required for currency to be transferable into energy and vice versa. There are also interesting logistical questions. Gold in any form has value as currency, but this would mean a car battery could then serve the same role as precious metals in our society--many such issues would have to be addressed. But the entire concept of an energy economy falls apart well before we get to storage capacity, so I won't say more on the subject.
Yes, societies use energy. Yes, we generate energy in tandem with our consumption of it. I do not disagree with any of this. Admittedly, an energy standard would require much energy to be stored and not used if it's to be equivalent to the gold standard, and that raises problems--why should energy in a battery somewhere be considered more valuable than energy somewhere else, and what's to stop someone from creating their own? But no, I don't disagree that energy consumption rises with production. I don't see how that relates to what I've been saying, however.
As I said above, storage doesn't interest me. It doesn't change the fundamental problems I see in the system, which I've spoken about at length now.
There might be a way to use energy as currency, but I don't know what that would be, except that it couldn't be anything like the gold standard. (Now that I think about it, it's very strange that we're discussing a system that is antiquated even in the present as a model for how the future will be.) But I don't think everything being composed of energy is a point in it's favor as a currency.
