As such, who do you trust to issue the currency? The Nagus cannot himself do that on top of his other duties, and any other Ferengi would abuse the position to consistently. The one thing you can say about almost every Ferengi, is that they are untrustworthy. I could invent my own currency right now, and legally I could issue it and trade in it, but very few people would actually use my currency because they don't trust me (and as such my currency would be meaningless). In order for a fiat currency to work, you have to be able to trust the issuer.
Having your money as just numbers would give less opportunity to boast. The Ferengi are shown repeatedly to be a somewhat vain group, so the ability to physically display currency, to "flash your cash" if you will, would be very appealing.The other answers definitely raise some good points, and are no doubt part of the decision, but I think the answer is a little more straight forward, and consists of two parts. Why haven't they invented banking or fiat money yet? I'm particularly interested in in-universe reasons, since the out-of-universe reasons seem rather straightforward to me, but if anyone has any direct quotes or other good sources, I'll take those too. They're still at the "everyone carries gold around in person" stage. There are counterfeiting problems, particularly in a world with replicators, but you can solve that by doing everything electronically with strong cryptography, which is just a scaling up of what we do today.īut the Ferengi don't seem to have followed this process. because a large mine opened or closed somewhere in the world). This lends greater stability to the currency since it is no longer directly upset every time there's a shortage or surplus of gold (e.g. Normally, this works out all right, though bank runs can be a problem.Įventually, we got to the point where the paper is no longer negotiable for gold at all. Then the banks got cleverer and invented fractional-reserve banking, where they hand out more paper tickets than the gold (or gold certificates) they actually have. Or it can be totally insecure, in which case you basically have gold-backed currency, though that's usually issued by governments instead of banks.
Paper is a lot more convenient to carry around than gold, and can be much more secure (with proper implementation).
But then someone invented banking, wherein the gold is held in a vault (or other secure location) and you get a paper ticket saying the bank owes you X ounces of gold. In human history, we used to do this with gold. Yet they always seem to cart around physical latinum (usually in gold-pressed form in-universe for convenience and out-of-universe so the allegory is blatantly obvious). In DS9 (and to a much lesser extent, TNG), the financial acumen of the Ferengi is repeatedly emphasized.
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