Space Money Invented For Space Tourists

An anonymous reader writes "The foreign exchange company Travelex has invented a unit of currency designed to be used in space commerce, the Quasi Universal Intergalactic Denomination (QUID). The QUID is made of a space-qualified plastic, with round edges to prevent injuries in zero gravity. One QUID is equivalent to about 6.25 pounds, 12.50 dollars or 8.68 Euros. Of course, space currencies are already a staple of science fiction, with 'credits' being the most popular."

Tracking the currency

[avij]

FTA:

Each of the orbiting planets will carry a number, like the serial numbers on notes, giving the disc a unique code thus allowing currency to be tracked and helping to prevent counterfeits.

So.. who's going to start a website for tracking those Quids, like Where's George? [wheresgeorge.com] or EuroBillTracker [eurobilltracker.com]? Might be fun..

What's the mass?

[reality-bytes]

If one of those 'QUIDS' has a mass of 10g and you want to take 10 'quid' with you on 'holiday'.

That 10 'quid' (worth £62.50), if launced on the STS would cost £240 to get to LEO due to their additional mass.

Therefore, if you used this new currency, to actually get that money (£62.50) on orbit would cost you over £300 extra.

Disclaimer: E&OE, YMMV, IANARS, My ability to perform basic mathematics is inversely proportional to the amount of alcohol I have consumed.

What a shame

[John Meacham]

They took the time to design a new monetary format and didn't even make it based on a Balanced Ternary [wikipedia.org] system. Balanced ternary cash would be quite nice, it would mean almost always having the exact change, you only need one coin of each denomination to ensure you can make change for any possible transaction among other nice qualities.

Re:Money is a sign of poverty.

[ObjetDart]

Holy missed Iain M. Banks reference, batman!

Yeah, except even Banks had to invent kudos [wikipedia.org] so that an ancient, amazingly advanced race of gas giant inhabitants still had something to exchange for products and services...they didn't have money of course, being so advanced, so they used kudos instead..which worked amazingly like...money.

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