Worldbuilding Weekend Prompt #139 - The Colour of Money
Welcome to the next in an ongoing series of writing prompts in the Worldbuilding community !
I'm aiming to post one of these each Sunday. They aren't a replacement for the excellent daily prompts from @worldbuilding they're just an extra opportunity if you have a writing itch you want to scratch. 😀
Image generated by AI in Wombo.art
The prompt this week is - The Colour of Money
This was prompted by something I needed to do in my own writing this week. It's all too easy, and lazy, to describe money in a book or game as "gold pieces" or "credits". But in reality, money has a history. It dates all the way back to the coins, until recently believed to minted by Croesus of Lydia, but new evidence suggests the first coins may have been electrum ones minted nearby in Ephesus, and Croesus only created the first gold coins. No-one knows what these coins were named, but subsequent Greek and Roman coins had a plethora of ever-changing names. Mostly the names seem to have changed as a way to hide inflation !
Even modern currency names have origin stories. The Pound Sterling is named so because the first versions were "Easterling", bought from the east by the merchants of the Hanseatic League. The US Dollar is derived from the dólar, a later name for the Spanish 8-real silver coin known in pirate stories as "Pieces of Eight", and also the Austrian Maria Theresa Thaler, a silver coin of the same weight first minted in 1741 and still happily accepted for payments in some parts of North Africa and the Middle East.
Tell me about money from your fantasy or sci-fi setting ! What is is called and where does it get the name ? What is it made of, and what is it supposed to be made of (not always the same thing !) ? How do people use it, and how do they exchange it for other currencies ? Or is it a digital currency ? If so, it'll still have a name - is it derived from a previous tangible currency, or some kind of acronym, or the latest dictator's name ? How is it carried around - a mobile device, inert cards of some kind that link to a digital account, or even just a biometric scan linked to an account. What (if anything) keeps it safe ?
Just to add a bit of spice to things, the two entries I most like (and are linked in comments to this post, so I can find them !) that are posted by midnight (GMT) next Saturday will each get a prize of one Hive SBI.
This link will take you to the FAQ where you can read more about Hive SBI - it's a project I thoroughly support because it gives both the donor and winner a steady trickle of passive income paid out in the form of upvotes on posts.
Guidelines
I stole these guidelines straight from @worldbuilding prompts (I hope that's okay !), I couldn't have written them any better myself....
- Prompt replies may be anything! Art, game assets, stories, worldbuilding details, fake wiki entries, maps... whatever you want to create!
- Please ensure you reply to this post with a link to your reply
- Posting in or cross-posting to the Worldbuilding community is highly encouraged
- Use the hashtag #worldbuilding
- Prompt replies can be any length.
- AI images to illustrate your posts are fine, as long as they are credited to whichever software you used to make them
- Posts using AI to create the text are not acceptable; these prompts (and community) are a way to expand and have fun with human imagination, and I firmly believe AI will never be able to replicate the human spark.
Some other neat communities for writing that you might want to check out are:
It can be a lot of fun to mix and match our prompts with some of these other community prompts.
People who have asked to be tagged;
@sherah
If you'd like to be tagged in on these prompts, let me know and I'll happily add you 🙂