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I don't have any rigor behind this, but my theory is that credits are used external to the Federation. And that transactions between Federation citizens are ess

by chiph 12y ago

I don't have any rigor behind this, but my theory is that credits are used external to the Federation. And that transactions between Federation citizens are essentially cashless. This lets the Federation trade with societies that value money (the Ferengi) yet not get all caught up in internal accounting. With replicator technology, a Star Fleet officer could produce all the gold pressed Latinum he wants. But that would obviously have bad effects on the Ferengi economy, so there's a moral rule in place (perhaps enforced with limits in the replicator code) not to do that.

abc123xyz 12y ago
In Star Trek the replicators were never able to make Latinum, hence probably why its so valuable to Ferengi
jiggy2011 12y ago
But then who gets to decide on that limit? Does the limit differ between people , i.e can senior officers print more currency because they might have more need for it? Is there a person who is in charge of tracking the Ferengi economy and deciding how much Latinum is ethical to produce based on inflation? Is there a board of people who decide? Do any Ferengi get a place on that board? What about people who do not have access to a replicator , can they access Latinum via somebody elses replicator without causing that person to go over the limit?
dragonwriter 12y ago
> With replicator technology, a Star Fleet officer could produce all the gold pressed Latinum he wants. The whole basis for latinum's value as a medium of exchange is the fact that it has some kind of technobabble immunity to replication so, no, they couldn't. (Latinum isn't the only thing which has this kind of problem -- IIRC, as also antimatter, dilithium, certain radioactives, and, well, basically anything that needed to be scarce in at least one episode where they didn't want to invoke the non-availability of the replicators has a similar issue; of course, given that replicators and transporters notionally work on the same principles, but most replicator-immune things have been transported in the series, there is a pretty deep technobabble consistency problem here, but that's a recurring problem in Trek.)
MichaelGG 12y ago
I hate to step out-of-universe, but replicators can't replicate any plot-overpowering materials. Ferengi certainly have Federation replicators as well as their own. If one of them could generate gold-pressed Latinum, then they'd be doing it. The in-universe explanations are something along the lines of "the pattern's too hard to replicate". Which even holds up for ciders and wines, where captains prefer "not the replicated stuff".

by chiph 12y ago

abc123xyz 12y ago

In Star Trek the replicators were never able to make Latinum, hence probably why its so valuable to Ferengi

jiggy2011 12y ago

But then who gets to decide on that limit? Does the limit differ between people , i.e can senior officers print more currency because they might have more need for it? Is there a person who is in charge of tracking the Ferengi economy and deciding how much Latinum is ethical to produce based on inflation? Is there a board of people who decide? Do any Ferengi get a place on that board? What about people who do not have access to a replicator , can they access Latinum via somebody elses replicator without causing that person to go over the limit?

dragonwriter 12y ago

> With replicator technology, a Star Fleet officer could produce all the gold pressed Latinum he wants. The whole basis for latinum's value as a medium of exchange is the fact that it has some kind of technobabble immunity to replication so, no, they couldn't. (Latinum isn't the only thing which has this kind of problem -- IIRC, as also antimatter, dilithium, certain radioactives, and, well, basically anything that needed to be scarce in at least one episode where they didn't want to invoke the non-availability of the replicators has a similar issue; of course, given that replicators and transporters notionally work on the same principles, but most replicator-immune things have been transported in the series, there is a pretty deep technobabble consistency problem here, but that's a recurring problem in Trek.)

MichaelGG 12y ago

I hate to step out-of-universe, but replicators can't replicate any plot-overpowering materials. Ferengi certainly have Federation replicators as well as their own. If one of them could generate gold-pressed Latinum, then they'd be doing it. The in-universe explanations are something along the lines of "the pattern's too hard to replicate". Which even holds up for ciders and wines, where captains prefer "not the replicated stuff".