What I liked about CredSticks is that in a lot of the art they were sharp and pointy. A pain to carry around in your pocket, but handy if you're out of other options for weapons.

I think alot of people underestimate the subtle genious of credsticks, their practical and fluff purposes.

Especially easier to just encode it onto the credstick. If you're a member of the club, you get the special discount on cover charges. If you're not... Well, let's just say it's cheaper to go to a five-star restaurant with your weightlifting girlfriend.

i'm still trying to reconcile the greatness of the credstick within my own soul... but I shall try to put it into words.

Credsticks engender in myself and my players the same feeling that cash does in real life. When we are paid with a briefcase of certified credsticks it just gives us that warm fuzzy feeling in our tummies like that briefcase was actually full of bundled 100s. The genious of concept is that credsticks can be used as either a sexy,slim check book without the outmoded shape and writing...or used as cash to be carried about in large quantities whilst engaging in shady transactions to protect identities. It serves all the practical needs while giving those lovers of money any type of emotional fix they require from a currency all in one long, penlike, phallic symbol.

Actually, I tend to carry around $1,000 in hard cash for those "just in case" moments of purchasing something that could be tracked back to you via credstick purchases.

Certified cred.

~J

I'm not finding the quote on-hand, but I'm almost positive that it's canon that credsticks have almost entirely supplanted physical currency.

~J

*waits for Kag to set them straight*

Got it: Sprawl Survival Guide, page 39: "Though finances have become more abstract over the last century, as electronic credit has gradually replaced cold hard cash". In the same book, page 91: "Panhandling's harder than it once was, now that we no longer use coins or hard cash."

~J

wow!!! nuyen is generic, we use it every where almost as common as visa is now!

wouldn't catch me doing a run for any other form of payment!

It would be very wrong to get rid of it!!




NUYEN forever!!!

Just my personal opinion!!

torz x

Hence almost entirely. Certainly it wouldn't be a factor in the continued production of wallets (or lack thereof).

~J

But there is a common and acceptable hard currency...it's called certified credsticks. They are paid for using registered cred and are the same exact thing as hard currency, whoever holds it owns the money in it without any kind of security measures.

I think some people maybe don't understand the difference between registered credsticks and certified credsticks.

So certified credsticks are basically chips with data on them symbolising a set amount of money, and don't come with any tracker, tag or serial number? Well, if you change the stick shape to soemthing less impractical, it would make perfect sense to have a wallet or soemthing for them.

Then again, maybe there could be something like a stick friendly wallet anyway. I doupt the wallet industry would just resign and die.

No, they'd change and build them differently. We've already had a transition from wallets meant to be kept in coat pockets to wallets meant to be kept in back pockets. Sticks are very wallet-ish-friendly, having carried around upwards of a dozen pens and mechanical pencils in high school I feel I'm quite qualified to speak on convenience of stick-shaped objects.

~J

I always imagined them the same size as the memory stick you can get for laptops, as sort of thing but not on a key ring?? (would be handy though)

torz x

Ah. Nope, it's still around.

~J

Credstick bandoleer!!

I seem to recall a canon reference to a wrist-based credstick holder that would be similar in function to a wallet, but don't remember where.

I've always considered Nuyen to be the official term for it, and Cred to be street slang.
I suppose we could always fall back on Ningys and Pu's.(Still 8 Ningys to hte Pu)

Personally I see a "wallet" becoming somthing more like a PDA holder. A small leather pouch that fits your pocket secratary, buisness cards, a spot to hold any paper money you have, a couple of those leather loop things that we put pens in now holding your credstick and a little clear panal with a picture of the wife and kids, or they're just the background or screen saver on your pocket secratary screen. The whole thing is designed to be compact enough to fit in a brest pocket, or perhaps your pocket secratary is durable enough that you can put it in your back pocket and sit on it.

Yeah, that'd make sense. Though I STILL think card shape is more appropriate for cred sticks than stick shape ... but meh. It seems to have won over cards, through whatever dark behind the scenes entity's manipulation ...

No card shape wouldn't be logical in the SR universe because it's too conventional and there was probably a subconcious trend toward more stremlined technology and a shift away from "square looking" things (maybe similar to the auto-design revoultion of the 1950s). Also, I don't think that the SR tech level would allow something as paper-thin as a card to hold everything a credstick does. This is total conjecture of course.

Yeah, sure, but data chips can hold twice the data and have a flat, card shaped format.

Maybe it's from the credstick initially being marketed as a self defense tool ... or toothpick ... or 'the swiss pocket knife meets mastercard'. And eventually, they left out the tools, and only the shape stayed for sentimental purposes.

they already do. an optical chip is tiny, yet holds thousands of Mp.

Store various amounts of data ... store more data ... contain more data and even more data that doubles as an ID card, allows you to access your accounts and whatnot, and can transmit this data via direct interface or (maybe) induced radio transmission ... what other features does it have?

And do credsticks require batteries? It's blow dragon chunks if someone woke up one day and found his ID, his SIN, his bank account keycode and all the other stuff stored on the stick was gone because he forgot to change batteries ... and I do hopte these batteries last longer than your average cellphone's!

Does your desired card have batteries? There's your answer.

~J

it holds data, and acts as an RFID. the data is important, and encrypted, but that's about it, unless i'm missing something.