It's funny, but just today I was discussing with a friend on Discord a workable alternative for money in Fallout setting (namely for Brotherhood of Steel and its clientelle) because bottle caps are incredibly stupid (just like sea shells). I proposed small electric batteries and he agreed.
Lets use cigarettes as a currency. Half year of capitalist brainwash is 200 cartons.
Eh, I disagree, batteries are too useful.
Money needs to be something dumb and useless, otherwise people will prefer to use it for their actual useful purpose than for monetary purpose.
There's even a theorem tied to this in a way: Gresham's theorem states that if you have both good money and bad money concurrently in circulation, good money will be hoarded and bad money will be spent, leading to only bad money staying in circulation.
What I'm describing is not fiat money. Gresham's theorem - named after Sir Thomas Gresham, a Tudorian economist, but that's a modern attribution - was well-known by late medieval period already & was already invoked e.g. by Copernicus in Monetæ cudendæ ratio, well before fiat currency system.
Transferred into your world; why buy and sell energy, when you can buy and sell something worthless that you can in theory use to buy energy with? Isn't trading actual energy a bit of a risk?
>Transferred into your world; why buy and sell energy, when you can buy and sell something worthless that you can in theory use to buy energy with?
Well, that's because we've been discussing a post-apocalyptic setting with scarce settlements. So we needed a step above barter, yet not a "real" modern type of currency, backed by a state (because there're no states). Something like ammo in the "Metro" series. My friend proposed liquid fuel, but I proposed batteries - because IIRC in the Fallout world everything runs on electricity/atomic energy. So in my vision you have things like CR2032 and AA batteries as money, "Krona" types as precious metals bars, accumulators of various sizes would be like a useful domestic animal - a goat or a chicken, and finally electrical generators - solar (on farms) or atomic (in big cities) or otherwise would be akin to windmills or watermills or something like that - a big and important utility that is used and maintained by the whole community. (Or by a lord of the lands, who lends it for limited use by his subjects - like windmills in medieval Europe, which were property of barons, who'd allow his serfs to grind their wheat on certain days only.)