Credits, currency, canon

[steve98052]

Per canon, Imperial Credit notes are manufactured from plastic fibers of assorted colors, extruded under high pressure and pressure into 75×125 mm blocks, then sliced paper-thin (0.05 mm each) from the extrusion. Each is marked with a 14-character alphanumeric serial code and the name of the sector that issued it.
Reference: http://wiki.travellerrpg.com/Imperial_Currency

A block of plastic extruded from colored fibers, then sliced into paper-thin currency would have a front side that looks as designed, and a back side that was a mirror image of the front. That's not very appealing; on the reverse side the text would read backwards, any portraits would be mirrored, and so forth.

One possible solution that remains consistent with the canon description is that the plastic fibers are a magical substance that, when sliced, can have a different color on the front and back end. Such a substance may be possible with TL15 technology, but it seems like a hand-wave.

An additional problem with the extrusion method is that it isn't compatible with serial codes. Fibers that have different colors on opposite cut ends are complicated enough -- but how do you make fibers that change color 20 times per millimeter in a pattern that matches the sequence of serial codes?

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So what to do? One possibility is that the blocks of plastic are extruded in pairs, sliced to half the finished thickness, then bonded in pairs (with the serial codes bonded into spaces reserved for them). That's not canon, but it's something that one could plausibly deduce as what the canon description really meant.

Any thoughts?

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Why do I care?
The reason I ask is that I'm planning to make some prop money, and I'd like it to be as consistent with canon as I can make it, short of acquiring a TL15 Imperial Credit extrusion machine. If they come out nice enough, maybe I'll even sell them as game accessories, license approval permitting.

 

[simonh]

Any thoughts?

Only that it should be trivially easy to counterfeit any such plastic-extrusion notes using 3-d printers barely more advanced than the ones we've got.

A composition that used many different materials in a complex matrix would be a lot harder to reproduce. Some materials such as metals can only be deposited or fused into place using high temperatures that would damage other adjacent materials, so it should be possible to design a composition that's hard or impossible to replicate using 3d-printer technology.

Simon Hibbs

 

[phavoc]

I think it's safe to assume that the Imperium's plastic notes have anti-counterfeit measures built into them. You have to remember the explanation for these notes is somewhat dated. And you could easily get around the limitations by hand-wavium: "...Additional security features are incorporated into the currency making it nearly impossible to duplicate without a combination of know-how, technology and materials."

The oddest thing I thought was the relatively small set of bank numbers associated with the notes. An empire the size of the Imperium utilizing 14 characters seems rather small. I'd think the serial numbers would be far larger.

 

[F33D]

The oddest thing I thought was the relatively small set of bank numbers associated with the notes. An empire the size of the Imperium utilizing 14 characters seems rather small. I'd think the serial numbers would be far larger.

Wouldn't 14 characters if it includes 26 letters & 10 numbers yield ~182,225,556,172,186,058,674,940,229,804,730,000,000,000 different combinations? That's a pretty large number. Would it be enough?

 

[phavoc]

Wouldn't 14 characters if it includes 26 letters & 10 numbers yield ~182,225,556,172,186,058,674,940,229,804,730,000,000,000 different combinations? That's a pretty large number. Would it be enough?

I guess that would depend on how much cash they would print. It's not indestructible, so they have to replace it on a regular basis. There's easily half a trillion beings in the Imperium, not to mention all the client states on the edges that take and accept and use Imperial currency. Like license plates or even social security numbers, eventually they will run out. Sure, they could always add a digit/letter position, but in a nation that standardizes screws and everything else, you'd think they were looking at a system that would go unaltered for 100's of years.

This is just idle speculation of course.

 

[F33D]

Wouldn't 14 characters if it includes 26 letters & 10 numbers yield ~182,225,556,172,186,058,674,940,229,804,730,000,000,000 different combinations? That's a pretty large number. Would it be enough?

I guess that would depend on how much cash they would print. It's not indestructible, so they have to replace it on a regular basis. There's easily half a trillion beings in the Imperium, not to mention all the client states on the edges that take and accept and use Imperial currency. Like license plates or even social security numbers, eventually they will run out. Sure, they could always add a digit/letter position, but in a nation that standardizes screws and everything else, you'd think they were looking at a system that would go unaltered for 100's of years.

This is just idle speculation of course.

That's true. Would probably need more digits.

 

[locarno24]

I guess that would depend on how much cash they would print. It's not indestructible, so they have to replace it on a regular basis. There's easily half a trillion beings in the Imperium, not to mention all the client states on the edges that take and accept and use Imperial currency. Like license plates or even social security numbers, eventually they will run out. Sure, they could always add a digit/letter position, but in a nation that standardizes screws and everything else, you'd think they were looking at a system that would go unaltered for 100's of years.

This is just idle speculation of course.

It also depends on what proportion of the Imperial Money Supply exists as 'hard cash' - for precisely the reasons mentioned above, I'd imagine there's a marked preference for keeping as much of the money supply electronic as possible. Also note that you therefore only need your 14-digit code to be unique within a sector, not the entire Imperium, as the issuing sector is on the note. That drops the population you're serving to 'only' a few hundreds of billions.

I'd suggest, as noted above, that two 'slices' bonded back to back makes the most sense. That way you get an aesthetically acceptible 'print' on both sides. Plus the method of bonding is another mechanical test you can do to confirm whether a note is genuine. Bloody useless to a shopkeeper but potentially useful to a forensics lab*. Also note that different plastics could be used at the same time - including some that 'burn' or 'melt' at different temperatures; layering them together in a specific order with heating or cooling as required does give you a measure of security; a ham-fisted forgery attempt would see different 'colour' or 'finish' (matt/reflective) polymer fibres melt and run into one another.


* Much like the standard US treasury arguments when told how easily forged Dollars are: "but we put microdot on them!" Yes, but no-one other than you and the police can tell, so it doesn't help me know if some bugger's passing me a duff note, does it?

 

[simonh]

...There's easily half a trillion beings in the Imperium, not to mention all the client states on the edges that take and accept and use Imperial currency. Like license plates or even social security numbers, eventually they will run out. Sure, they could always add a digit/letter position, but in a nation that standardizes screws and everything else, you'd think they were looking at a system that would go unaltered for 100's of years.

Even if the population is a trillion, that's still ~182,225,556,172,186,058,674,940,229,804 unique notes per citizen. Lets say an average of 1 million notes get used up and replaced per citizen in one generation, that's ~182,225,556,172,186,058,674,940 generations worth of notes.

How many more digits were you thinking they'd need?

Simon Hibbs

 

[F33D]

* Much like the standard US treasury arguments when told how easily forged Dollars are: "but we put microdot on them!" Yes, but no-one other than you and the police can tell, so it doesn't help me know if some bugger's passing me a duff note, does it?

Merchants can buy (quite cheaply) the equipment that verifies the electronic security devices in US currency. Many vending machines have them built in...

 

[dragoner]

I was in Mexico and there were people selling 20 dollar bills for a dollar, no way would I have touched that; no matter how good, you will be caught. It makes for a good opening for adv 2 though.

 

[phavoc]

Even if the population is a trillion, that's still ~182,225,556,172,186,058,674,940,229,804 unique notes per citizen. Lets say an average of 1 million notes get used up and replaced per citizen in one generation, that's ~182,225,556,172,186,058,674,940 generations worth of notes.

How many more digits were you thinking they'd need?

Simon Hibbs

There's about $1.2 trillion US dollars in circulation (includes coinage as well). There's probably an equivalent amount of Euro's, and probably at least that much in Chinese Yuan. It can add up really quick when you have an empire the size of the Imperium. Plus the serial numbers may have fixed digits (representing sub-sectors, Imperial central banks, etc) that you would not use to calculate the digits.

Depending on how long the currency lasts in circulation, it will affect how much they need to print. Also, we don't know the starting date for when the serial numbers were started.

Like I said, just idle speculation.

 

[steve98052]

Are the serial numbers long enough? Yes.

For comparison, the US Gross Domestic Product was just under $15 trillion, and the amount of cash in circulation was just over $1 trillion; cash in circulation amounted to about 6.9% of GDP. (Figures are from 2011, the latest I could find.)

According to tables someone worked out with Far Trader, the Imperium has a Gross Domestic Product of just under 91 quadrillion Credits (9.085×10^16). But what percentage of that is cash? On one hand, the lag introduced by jump argues for a higher percentage. On the other hand, much of the Imperium's population lives on words with at least enough technology to allow most economic activity to happen electronically, which argues for a lower percentage.

For the sake of discussion, assume that the Imperium has a moderately higher share of currency in circulation, due to jump lag and the fact that the Imperium represents the space between worlds more than one individual worlds. Ten percent is a simple figure, which means almost 9 quadrillion Credits in circulation.

Canon says that serial numbers are 14 alphanumeric characters. Assuming that means the digits and letters used by Anglic, that means 36 possible characters, for a total of 36^14 possible serial numbers (unless some are excluded because they spell forbidden words). It appears that the Windows 7 calculator is pretty good at long integer arithmetic; it gives this exact figure for 36^14:
6 140 942 214 464 815 497 216
That's not the number of Credits that can be in circulation, it's the number of notes (or notes plus coins, if coins have serial numbers too).

For comparison, here's the total Gross Domestic Product figure, rounded to the nearest billion Credits:
90 849 508 000 000 000

If the Imperium issued enough one-Credit coins to cover its entire GDP (not the ten percent I proposed), and put serial numbers on each of them, 36^14 is 67,595 times larger than the GDP.

Again, that ignores the fact that most of the value of cash in circulation will be in high-value notes, not coins. Drawing from US figures again, I found that by number of notes, 25% of all US currency was $100 bills, and 76% of the value of US currency was in $100 bills. Numerically, $50 bills were another 4%, and 6% of value; $20 bills were 22% numerically and 13% by value; $1 bills (including the little-used coins) were 34% numerically but only 1% by value.

What does that do to Imperial Credits? Although 10k notes are not very numerous, they're still likely to dominate the total value of Credits in circulation, both because of their disproportionate value and because they are the most space-efficient means of storing or transporting large amounts of money in the form of cash. Tinkering with the numbers, I concluded that a million Credit notes (including coins) was probably worth about 100 million Credits.

Given that, our 36^14 figure is enough serial numbers for something like 6.76 million times the number of notes in circulation. That's enough to exclude a lot of forbidden words that the serial numbers might spell out, and allow for things like check digits and encoding assorted information (denomination, sector of issue, year of issue) into the serial number, still with room to spare. We could also afford to toss out either the digit zero or the letter "O" to avoid confusion; 35^14 is just over two-thirds of 36^14.

My guess is that when GDW assembled the Imperial Encyclopedia (the source credited by http://wiki.travellerrpg.com/Imperial_Currency for the information), someone got out a scientific calculator and figured out how many characters they'd need for the serial number, given 11000 worlds, some with billions of people, and some guess about how much cash that number of people might need in circulation, and picked the "14 alphanumeric characters" figure to allow for that with a comfortable margin of error.

 

[steve98052]

I think it's safe to assume that the Imperium's plastic notes have anti-counterfeit measures built into them. You have to remember the explanation for these notes is somewhat dated. And you could easily get around the limitations by hand-wavium: "...Additional security features are incorporated into the currency making it nearly impossible to duplicate without a combination of know-how, technology and materials."

If the notes are made by some extrusion process that leaves cut ends that are different colors on the front and back end of the extrusion, that's some pretty special manufacturing. But it still doesn't allow for the serial numbers, so we have to assume some "additional security features".

I'd suggest, as noted above, that two 'slices' bonded back to back makes the most sense. That way you get an aesthetically acceptable 'print' on both sides. Plus the method of bonding is another mechanical test you can do to confirm whether a note is genuine. Bloody useless to a shopkeeper but potentially useful to a forensics lab*. Also note that different plastics could be used at the same time - including some that 'burn' or 'melt' at different temperatures; layering them together in a specific order with heating or cooling as required does give you a measure of security; a ham-fisted forgery attempt would see different 'colour' or 'finish' (matte/reflective) polymer fibres melt and run into one another.

* Much like the standard US treasury arguments when told how easily forged Dollars are: "but we put microdot on them!" Yes, but no-one other than you and the police can tell, so it doesn't help me know if some bugger's passing me a duff note, does it?

Nice idea! If they're going to bond slices together, as I proposed, that opens up a number of possibilities for security features. They could have spaces where there's a third layer in between translucent front and back layers, allowing for watermarks. They could include conductive fibers that act as RFID. They could include elements with testable magnetic properties. But the idea of layers that simply won't stick to each other without some very high technology manufacturing process is particularly good.

The idea that some patches might not stick to each other without advanced manufacturing technology suggests another possibility: notes could have patches of different texture. Not only would that be an anti-forgery feature that doesn't require test equipment, it would allow blind people (and non-human Imperial citizens) to recognize bills by touch. Some patches might be slippery while others are rubbery. Some might be so heat-conductive that they feel cool to the touch, while others are heat-insulating and feel more ordinary. Maybe there's a patch with some interesting catalytic property that causes a chemical reaction in some widely-available test substance.

There are a lot of specific possibilities we could name, but getting too specific risks having real-world technology run ahead of the science fiction. For example, in the not too distant past, some metals could not be welded to each other by any means, but with laser welding they can. Best to leave some of the secrets undefined.

 

[dragoner]

I think the effectiveness, and profitability of counterfeiting is being over stated; for example, more could be done to modern currencies to prevent it, but isn't. I doubt it is even at a nuisance level economically; however, at a personal level it is particularly onerous, and thus there would be (and is, I'm sure) help from the population at large to stop it.

 

[Condottiere]

Going by our norms, letters of credit used to facilitate trade and liquidity before electronic transactions really took off. In fact, I vaguely recall it was the refusal to recognize one by a corresponding bank that brought on the Long Night.

More centralized regimes would put in place currency restrictions, or at least, insist on knowing if the cash you're carrying exceeds a certain amount. They'd also be interested in tracking large transactions for tax and internal security reasons, or just because you look suspicious.

Trade goods (as opposed to personal jewelry) probably do have to be declared, though you may run into some bureaucratic intervention for some of the hotter ones, like drugs (recreational or otherwise) and weapons. Foodstuffs and chemicals probably do need some form of inspection.

This is probably why avoiding bureaucratic hassles and Imperial entanglements makes smuggling so attractive, especially if the ship is stealthy enough to land in some remote location without detection.

For the cosmic casanova, the interstellar equivalent of cigarettes, blue jeans, nylon stockings. chewing gum and chocolates may yield interesting results.

 

[F33D]

More centralized regimes would put in place currency restrictions, or at least, insist on knowing if the cash you're carrying exceeds a certain amount. They'd also be interested in tracking large transactions for tax and internal security reasons, or just because you look suspicious.

The Imperium isn't a centralized regime in that fashion.

 

[Condottiere]

I was thinking more in terms of a paranoid planetary potentate, perhaps battling a religiously affiliated terrorist group with off world sympathizers,

 

[F33D]

I was thinking more in terms of a paranoid planetary potentate, perhaps battling a religiously affiliated terrorist group with off world sympathizers,

Well, that paranoid planetary potentate hasn't control of Imperium starports. Can't search incoming/outgoing ships. That would tend to put a damper on that. He could search persons at the starport interface dirtside. But that would be less effective...

 

[Condottiere]

In this particular scenario, access to and from Downports, whether by air, ground or sea, can be funnelled through security checkpoints. If ships wander off designated atmospheric corridors, they would be subject to interception.

 

[F33D]

In this particular scenario, access to and from Downports, whether by air, ground or sea, can be funnelled through security checkpoints. If ships wander off designated atmospheric corridors, they would be subject to interception.

Correct. However, that does nothing about how much cash is carried by ships to a Downport itself.