Why Bottle Caps are Money in Fallout 

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Vault tec did kinda predict it with the barter bobblehead

One thing a lot of people don't talk about is in the DLC Old World Blues and Lonesome Road it is stated that the military had these chips that you could trade for items you needed for your job for luxuries but it turned out that it was basically the style of a bottle cap that was The Lonesome Road reason

Bottle Caps are Fallout's Gold Pieces

Actual post-government currencies in use where things like cigarettes. (Berlin after the war, and also often in prisons). Something that has an intrinsic value, is easily tradable, hard to copy (without resources), light and sufficiently small to handle it. The thing itself does not need to be consumable, if there is some authority that hold the promise to exchange it for something consumable. That however needs a certain level of trust.

East coast bottle caps were explained in fallout seventy six. It was an actual pre-war nukka cola promotion at the white Spring that carried over into the Apocalypse.By the robots running the building. Apologies for the poor grammar and spelling but i'm using voice to text

The gold mine was where the surthlight was, the mine got dirty bombed

This Ai generated fallout image is cursed AF

A bit late for the party, but... why caps? Well, hints to a convincing, in-game lore explaination already exist in Fallout 3, New Vegas and 4. # and 4 have the Nuka Cola campaigns, the pre-war ones. Nuka World had bottle caps exchanged for memorabilia, toys and little prizes, and, New Vegas had the blue star caps, for the Sasparilla campaign. Both pre-war. Now, the sweet spot for this, is the time between the nuclear holocaust and the games timeline. Even if Fallout 76 is a few decades after the bombs, it's still ... decades. Enough time for most of the surviving children, and teenagers, that were collecting bottlecaps, and, most likely held onto their prized possessions throughout the bombs, to still clinge into the idea that their caps are extremely valuable. Sure, they'd never get to exchange them for a free nuka cola, or meet the sherriff in Vegas, but, they still felt valuable. And, at some point, all those surviving kids became adults. Adults with one thing in common. Their establ;ished belief that bottlecaps are valuable. Not a set value per single cap, yet, but enough vague notion to begin trading with them as currency. And, through time, unavoidable arguments, many of which violent and lethal, a consensus was set, that one single bottlecap has a very specific value. The Hub, of course finetuned it to a set value that was universally agreed upon, namely one cap equals one water bottle. But, even that was establ;ished long after these early survivors had spread the, yet unstable, new currency out of their old world stashes.

Maybe east coast cap usage has more to do with alcohol than water. It seems everyone In Appalachia are brewing their own alcohol. From there it spread to the rest of the east coast.

Think about it like this: bottle caps are standardized, they’re hard to replicate without lots of machinery and material, and the only other things that share that property in the wasteland are medicine and ammo, which both share the problem that there’s a lot of versions of them both and that your enemies could potentially use them against you, which caps have neither issue. There’s also millions of bottle caps scattered about from the pre war meaning that there’s room for the economy to grow, you don’t get to a point where a piece of bread is worth less than a cap and the whole economy breaks

Here is some real world bit, often companies have some weird programs where you get stuff for codes in bottle caps, now a fallout equivalent, due to lack of Internet, would to hand the caps to a robot, which is something seen in Fallout 76 and the Star bottle caps in New Vegas. So I would say larger trade organisations which get around much would come across such robots, those traders might facilitate the use of bottle caps as currency to get there hands on those special bottle caps needed to get what ever usefull or rare goodies those robots hand out

Robots/tom, just gotta say I found your podcast recently and started from the beginning so I decided to find the yt, this one just fought my eye while I was checking out the channel lol, but I’m talking to you present as I listen you yoj in the past😂 good job man

The NCR dollar is the standard currency in Fallout 2. Didn't you play that game?

This narrator can Seriously Pratt On about Absolutely Nothing in what he could summarize in just a couple of minutes!!! 🤠👍

It would be cool if you could make a unique weapon or outfit with prewar money. Like a special Molotov or something

i dont even have to watch this to know what to reply, fallout 1 covers it well where as fallout 3 just copies the recipe and fallout 4 because why not the fans wont mind (that last bit about fo4 is because you could have 3 words and you can where as fo1 has a whole reason for the use of bottlecaps. fo4's reason is, it just works.) now besides bagging bethesda out the reason is simple irl, because its something fans recognise. but overall is just bethesda saying they are to lazy to make a new currency. anyway just gonna leave it at that.

Money, currency and fiat currency actually have specific, real definitions.

I got caps that jingle jangle jingle!

1 bottlecap was worth 1 bottle of water? that's pretty shortsighted... it would mean that that water would now go uncovered. Disqualifies the entire point of a bottle cap's practical use

You can either barter - wanted goods, for wanted goods or use a small, light, portable, fungable token either intrinsicly valuable - i.e. gold/silver coins worth the value of the material or a pure token that is more expensive to replcate than the face value - Bottle caps after the bombs drop fit all these critera Most real world currencies are backed by governments who promise to keep the currency stable, and will only let you pay taxes in the currency

In the real world sayings like "How are you going to pay for that? Bottle tops?" have been around as long as I can remember & I'm south of 40.

Caps are lightweight, durable, and nonfungable. As long as caps are accepted for trade, it's a good currency.

So who is setting the price to get a purified water for a battle cap because his premise is unfounded if there's isn't a backer for bottle caps for purified water

You get a bottlecap from a nuka cola or sunset sasperrilla

If the pandemic was any indication, our currency would be toilet paper

What about the bowling alley? Or Fallout 2 money

When I was a wee lad playing fallout 3 (Yes that was the first one I played and still is my fav) I used to come up with narratives to fill in the blanks and write my own lore honestly it got to the point where I didn't know where my lore began and the actual fallout lore ended. So I know this isn't helpful at all and honestly no point in putting down my own lore but fuck it here goes. After the nukes fell and destroyed most of the infrastructure humanity for better or worse survived the harsh lands where inhospitable food and water scarce but one thing provided hope....Nuka Cola you see before the nukes metal became hard to get as it was used to build countless labyrinthian vaults, super multilevel complex labs like BigMT, and military hardware for America to ensure there supremacy. All these projects made it difficult to obtain any quality source of metal without great cost so how do you think Nuka Cola approached this? I'll tell you how they started a recycling initiative they retrofired there machines to take bottle caps the only metal required for manufacturing there product. Yes ladies and gentlemen for 20 bottle caps you could get yourself a life saving Nuka Cola not a bad deal post apocalypse for sure and so the standard was set.... Whats that you say? "What happens when all the vending machines run out of nuka cola then wouldn't bottle caps be worthless" you say? Well yes of course but that's the funny thing for some odd reason they never did run out! At first we didn't notice nobody did we just figured we where lucky enough to come across a vending machine that had Nuka in it well after awhile some of us got suspicious while others flat out cracked the machines open and do you know what we found! Nuka Cola of course but we also to our surprise found out that a Mr.Handy the very next day stopped by and started repairing the damn thing. The Mr.Handy was in amazing condition and sported a Nuka Cola paint job that was almost pristine. Turns out Nuka Cola plants are well......Nuke Proof who would have guessed so the automation that occurred due to the troubles found in America, and Nuka Cola's drive to cut cost even when it means firing over 80% of your work force created the economy we know and love today! Also as a kid I had a absurd theory that vault 92 was the actual cause of the MireLurks a wild one for sure but my theory was that the white noise combined with RADS from the lake awoke a primal part of our brain that harked back to our primal evolutionary genetics causing humanity to mutate into isopod like creatures. This theory was definitely one of the more far fetched ones but I still enjoyed it and when I found a Mirelurk King/Queen I foolishly thought it confirmed my theory

U.s. currency has value because it's tied to Petro most countries trade in petrodollars which is just u.s. money

Connecting money to gold also controls inflation as you can only have as much money in circulation as there is gold to back it. So the government couldn't spend more than it had. This is why the gold standard needs to return. And why the Federal Reserve needs to be abolished.

Liked the podcast's content about the bottle caps! Really not a fan of the ai art though, would much rather prefer stuff related to the video or even just random fallout gameplay.

While I do enjoy the "76 is a simulation" theory the "NCR Ranger Outfit" can debunk it. See the chest piece has some text on it that reads "LAPD Riot" the helmet is also an "Old World" Army Ranger helmet. Its not too far fetched to consider that the BOS in 76 would have brought some of it with them as we know they walked from Cali to WV. And in the game its not called the "NCR Ranger Outfit" its the Eliet Ranger Armor Outfit as the NCR isnt established till well after the events in 76. Players just call it the NCR Ranger Armor because thats what it becomes.

The 76 is a simulation is so weak, it's referenced in older games as a standard vault, the one log about a simulation is most likely a fourth wall jab about the game being an MMO, and the New Vegas gear and other stuff showing up in game is pandering to get money...