As I understand it… this is somewhat theoretical, and somewhat backed by fairly scant historical, prehistorical/anthropological data…
Caps, being accepted … broadly, regionally… implies, as you say, the infrastructure of The Hub’s water merchants and traders.
This would be a greater level of … general social cohesion and trust… because the caps, a cap itself… is not really a directly useful commodity in and of itself.
Cigs and tampons and condoms… things like these often naturally arise as psuedo currencies in situations like prisons, PoW camps… and part of the theory on why that seems to fairly consistently happen is that, in addition to having other attributes of a good money, a good currency… is that they do have a generally applicable direct use as an actual good.
So basically, the more inherent trust and level of technological development in society… the more likely you are to find that society with a currency/money that is further removed from being a directly useful or consumable good.
There are a good number of historical exceptions to this though, so… just a theory hehe.
Nah it’s pretty well proven I think, barter and trade has always been an informal method of…well…barter and trade lol, when currency can’t be used for some reason (like prison, or trading rifles for land from the Native Americans, etc, many examples throughout history). Sure there’s exceptions, but I’d call it common enough that it’s true, personally anyway.
The problem is it doesn’t scale well, eventually it gets to the point where you need bullets and have chickens but the bullet guy has chickens too and he needs more lead for casting and brass to reload, so you have to go find out what the lead and brass guys want, and it becomes a whole thing, where having something as an abstraction of value means we can all just get what we want easier. That and you eat/smoke/drink/consume your “money” somehow by necessity if it’s usable goods, or it rots etc, whereas if there’s an abstraction of value that is only used for that purpose it’s easier to save, transport, etc. It’s absolutely human nature to use trade/barter when money isn’t an option, but due to all that bullshit that comes with barter, money eventually gets reinvented by society because it’s just so handy, like The Hub using caps backed by water.
Everything you’ve said is generally true, but I say… not 100% or confirmed or without exception…
Because we keep finding exceptions.
Some cultures… actually do seem to have skipped the commodity-currency phase, and gone straight to things like specific shells, or beads, or something else that has no practical utility.
Some other cultures just… didn’t do currency. Basically at all. Gift economies, handled by frequent communal sharing events and/or parties/feasts/festivals.
You’ve got things like tally sticks, though those are ultimately backed by a formal social structure… they dynamics of how they work as currency is significantly different than most others.
I didn’t want to sound too certain about it because I’ve already made jokes about evo-psych in this thread.
A lot of economists like to project their modern worldviews backward, and are then slapped in the face by anthropologists/ancient historians/archaelogists, telling them the actual evidence shows that economist’s thought experiments are often overly simplistic, lack nuance, and functionally try to cram a limited framework onto what increasingly seems to have been a much more diverse and varied, and localized and unique actual human history.