Yeh so we all have our cred sticks, loaded with personal guff. Hell I've got six, depending on who I want to be and whos asking. But is there any hard cash left in 2040++?
I know you can do jobs for goods and gold etc but what about just good ol' CASH?
How do you tip the street bum who happened to help out (even by accident)?
Or the street busker playing some vibrant tunes to liven the scene?

Not everybody could possibly carry a stick reader...
Just wondering.

Many people carry small certified credsticks to toss to someone as a tip.

The most common paper currency is Corporate Scrip. Issues by large corporation for their own people to use in their own building.

Here's a thread on Corporate Scrip.

can two credsticks link up to transfer amounts? If so, would a waiter leave you a blank credstick to add a tip to, would that bum just hold out his credstick? I bet thats how small change is passed.

The Nuyen has no hard currency equivalent, it is purely electronic money. However, the UCAS Dollar is still in existance and does exist in hard currency form. This is probably what you'd give bums and such.

Stick-to-stick transfers are possible, but are not "real" until the transaction is verified by a credstick reader (all home telecoms can do this by logging into your bank account, or a store machine can do the same). Basically, think of it like a check. You can write a check to someone, but then you can make a cancel payment on it before it's cashed. So yes, bum could certainly do this. Only real assholes would give a bum 1$ and then cancel it when he gets home.

an interesting fact is that they have started doing stuff like this already - there is a program, IIRC using PayPal, you can get that goes on Palm devices and allows you to beam money to each other. When you sync your Palm device back up, it does the actual money transfers at that time.

For instance, if a group is out to lunch, one person can pay with his credit card and everyone can beam him their "share" of the bill, etc.

In my home campaign, i've had UCAS agents hire the team to do a job, and offer to pay "50,000" per runner - that's all i said...they jumped at the chance...they were a little upset when they were given a suitcase full of 50,000 UCAS DOLLARS - which is only about 10,000 nuyen. I've also paid them in various other foreign currencies and corp scrip and used the various exchange rates - what?? you have Euros?? sure, the exchange rate to the nuyen is 4.75 today. What?? It was 5.05 to the nuyen last Wednesday! I'm sorry, sir, but fluctuations in the local markets have caused a temporary drop - oh, and there will be a 10% exchange fee...

I tend to deal my day to day expenses in Australian dollars or ucas dollars (so far I have only played in Australia or seatle, I would use any convenient hard currency). This is for groceries gum, things like that, it avoids the electron trail.

a determined Decker could trace where a certified credstic was used (its just an unnamed bank account you can still get the transaction history if you look in the right place) and cross reference with store security cameras. Only a J that was out to screw you and had a good decker on side could manage it but do you want to take that risk.

For large transactions I hand over the cred stick of the appropriate amount (using stick to stick transfers).

It all depends on your level of alertness (that thing the uninitiated call paranoia).

Edward

Remember if your not paranoid your not paying attention.

Well In my Game we all use Hard currency and not the E-stuff, this is just my house rule and it seems to work out just fine, i say alot of places in my game use hard currency cause lack of credstick verifiers in the area of Redmond and Tourist ville.

I hate credsticks. Not credit, universal currency, and universal IDs however, just credsticks. They're unweilding, awkward, and annoying to use in most everyday situations.

There's also no way the underworld would have switched to something that can be traced as easily as electronic credit can be, and no one's going to stop and thumb their credstick/credit card with some bum on the street or even toss an inexpensive credstick/card at one as they pass by. Same goes for a lot of standard transactions, particularly small ones.

It's also a poor game design choice. Which is more exciting and fun on both a descriptive and psychological level? Tossing a blah credstick on the table or pulling up a briefcase loaded with stacks of 20¥-100¥ bills?

Quite a long time ago I came up with several pages worth of information for our games that included nuyen in cash form (using both banknotes and coins as well as redesigning credsticks into universal credit cards/IDs and bearer bonds). It's worked wonders in our game and has enriched it significantly, allowing players to describe minor aspects of their everyday life a lot easier than credsticks allowed. It's also lead to more exciting runs, too, and that's probably the most important thing.

But all of that is house-ruled stuff and hardly canon.

I'm thinking, though, that RFID would essentially make cash and coin just as useless then.

The best currency rip-off is paying them in yen. It even sounds like you may have misspoke when saying nuyen. Just slur your speach a bit. That' and they may stop you at the "one hundred thou-" point before you can even say yen.

Ah, the mighty UCAS dollar. Allows you the ability to bribe cops the right way…"Dunkelzahn says that I didn't just blow through that red light; you don't need to search the car."

I like using both sticks and cash in my games. Most legit places only take credsticks, but banks, brokerages, and the underworld all take cash too.

Of course cash is only Corp, or Gummit, but most folks carry a little of it, if for nothing else but to grease the wheels of society.

It's almost impossible to believe that there is no more cash, because it's just not practical cost-wise to require unlimited electronic credsticks (which have to have top-of-the-line anti-piracy/forgery/etc countermeasures or they'd be useless) when paper/metal is so much cheaper. Put simply, it'd cost too much compared to the benefit.

As some of you have already said, is anyone going to have a street bum have to do his thumb print to slide a few nuyen (and would that even work for someone who was SIN-less)? Or for that matter, are the rich and powerful really going to give up something that helps them hide their assets from Uncle UCAS and the tax man? Or organized crime going to do extortion/prostitution/gambling/etc using easily tracable electronic funds?

If you just start using credstick, with or without keeping cash in circulation, you'll have to pay the cost for anti-piracy/forgery countermeasures as well as for the acts of those who manage to beat them. We are nowadays already paying those costs to use credit cards and shop on the internet. I can say, the cost to achieve a decent level of security is not out of reach, the French system is pretty well secured (numeric code, transaction data saved on the card's chip and fraud insurance).

Ad if you keep cash in circulation, while paying the cost for electronic transactions, you'll also have to pay the cost of cash dispensers, safe deposits and transport, as well as for the acts of those who manage to beat them.

If you wanted to save money, you'll only keep one of these systems, electronic or cash. Now if you want to suppress one of them, which one would think the multinationals who manipulate the government, company who trade on a daily basis in billions of dollars all over the world, in countries who use different currencies, would favor ?

Ths is for the sake of argumentation. Personnally, I think cash would be kept at hand, because the cost to maintain both system is within acceptable limits. In my games, UCAS' Dollar or Euro exist in cash, but Nuyen doesn't (since the megacorporations who created and support it through the Z-OG Bank have no need for cash).

Cash bills and coins are canon, at least for some locales. Tir Tairngire's bills have a holographic picture of the Council of Princes on them.

It might have been precisely in part because of the underworld economy that the move toward universal all-in-one credsticks would have been encouraged by the megacorporations ... and resisted by every last element of the shadow community.

Come to think of it, the amount of cash money in circulation in a given place as a percentage of the total might make a good barometer of the amount of shadow business against the entire economy.

[Damn, Tenebris types fast. What he said.]

"Trust our cyber-currency, we own all the really good hackers."

I think I'll go buy some gold...

I read in "Shadowplay" that alot of the Ameri-Indian towns/cities take hard cash as currency for tips, drinks, small things and Credsticks when purchasing big things. Of course as soon as you leave the town/city the hard cash becomes funny money.

Feonyx

1) If they were so bleeding convenient and superior to a card, we'd be using 'em today. But full pen-sized plastic sticks (SR3 p. 238) aren't convenient, they aren't comfortable in your pocket, and they are relatively fragile in that shape and size.

2) Credsticks include way more than what you're saying. They include everything about you, right down to your medical history and all of your vital information -- someone can steal one, break it open, and have everything they need (including signatures and retinal/palm/fingerprints... even your DNA information and passwords if you were stupid enough to add them) to do whatever they want in your name. They also include all of your transactions, all of your permits, all of your licenses, all of your contracts, and everything else along those lines.

Having them all on a single awkward, easily-stolen/lost, easily-broken stick is just a horrible, horrible idea all around. The shape of a credstick alone offers nothing over the already well-established credit card shape, won't fit in a wallet, and (again) is relatively fragile in the described shape and size.

They also can't function as any type of ID without having to slot it, so just flashing one won't work -- you have to slot it and thus offer up allll of your personal information just to get into a nightclub, buy some booze, or anything else that requires an ID check.

A universal ID is a good idea. A universal credit card is a good idea. A universal medical card is a good idea. Combining them all into one is a horrible idea. Especially if you change it into a useless friggin' stick.

no it is not a debit card..
they just added it to the same bank card you usually have to keep costs low and to try to increase acceptance, but it is a separate system.
the difference is this, when you pay with a debit card you identify yourself, & basically give an authorisation for money to be taken from your account into that other persons account. you can later see in your receipts where it went to etc etc.. fully traceable.

the chipknip is intended to replace loose change, cash in general.
with this you identify yourself ONCE, you need to go to an atm to recharge it, you identify yourself because you are recharging it from your bank account, however, once the cash is `in the card` it is no longer linked to your bank account or to your person in any way.
lets say you `recharged 100 euros in your chipknip..
if you lose the card you LOSE the 100 euros. this is NOT like a debit card.
if the card is stolen the 100 euros are stolen. nothing you can do about it, nothing gets transferred out of any accounts, the little card knows how much money it has and spends until it is empty. the only trace that there is at the moment is that you know who put the money in the card, not who spends it, there is no link whatsoever with any bank account after it has been recharged , if your account gets closed, you get labelled most wanted criminal nr 1 and all your accounts get closed, that card will still work until it runs out of whatever money you put into it..

DS

hell they have certified cred (prepaid chipknips) my thought is get me a prepaid, a programming suite and a smart card encoder

You’ll probably need a scanning electron microscope to crack those chipknip cards.

The biggest problem with any form of card cash (assuming you can secure them from forgery) is no reader transactions. Every shop that takes EFT or credit cards has a supply of manual vouchers for when the system goes down (and it dose). Most people still use cash so they can lend their mate $20 or just to avoid transaction fees (I get 8 free a month I think).

As to durability I doubt you could break a credstick if you tried. I see them being about the size of a cigarette lighter probably with a key ring attachment and made out of solid plastic (with a couple of imbedded chips). It would take a real effort to break one. If that was instead of a wallet (including all your ID, cards, licenses) it would be quite convenient. Most clothing would likely come with a specially designed pocket just the right size.

Cash is still better however for anything small and below the law. 200 ucas dollars in cash will more likely be taken as a bribe than a 220 nuyen credstick transfer because the one receiving it doesn’t have a credstick that won’t have it show up on all the reports. And getting certified credsticks can be a pain in the but. This is listed under the reasons why the J might be paying you in some other form of currency.

Edward

Actually, I don't see why implanting your credstick into yourself isn't a popular option. CREDSTICK, it's everywhere you want to be!

Kremlin, the hard part with that concept is each of those cards is encoded with a unique identifier, the system sees the ID and the money. the ID of the card is tracked to prevent such fraud.
Bank Emp. 1: "Gee, card 87A45hA has spent over $10,000"
Bank Emp. 2: "What's so odd about that?"
Bank Emp. 1: "Well, when it was issued, it had $100 and hasn't been recharged since."
Bank Emp. 2: "I'll start pulling footage from the stores where it's been used."

Cash: Great for the dirty deeds.
Credstick: Great for creating false identities (and spending money that's not yours )

If a credstick is a pen-size object, I'd lose it WAY too often.

A smoother system would be a ring that only acts to grant you access to a system that is the worlds trust of credit. (yeah right)

Credsticks in my game are debit card/credit card/check cards with a micro-data link on the chip on the card for those "stick-to-stick" moments.

But the credstick always sat right next to the pocket-secretary in my book of making sense.

In SR terms, they do that sort of checking, what makes a good falsified credstick is the team of deckers that make false entries to show normal activity.

actually in shadowrun you wouldnt need identifiers.. just an encryption hard enough that it would be more difficult to counterfeit than it would be for the equivalent amount of bank notes..
sidenote: it is not that difficult to use really high or odd encryption on this type of transaction as it doesnt need to be super-fast, hey if the quantum physicists get it together they might even have the holy grail , completely unbreakable encryption, by 2064

DS

If we're going to play with quantum physics why not toss out the idea of making an encryption and sticking it in a digital black hole?
No entrance to it.
No exit to it.
No readout from it.
The only thing you'd be able to notice is that there's "nothing" there.