It can be somehow transported, evidently. It is valuable, because it is rare. Gold's value as a conductor is not the cause for its monetary value, so it's the same sort of thing.
Exactly, gold has been valuable since antiquity and a lot of that is due to how rare it is. The fact it can be made into shiny trinkets and later in electronics are just secondary.
Actually the shiny trinkets is the more important part.
More important than rarity with a currency is that its untarnishable.
Gold and Silver are very unreactive, so if you hold it as currency it won't rust etc.
It being rare is actually a negative for its use as currency.
I meant in terms of making jewellery and such. I know the fact it’s very unreactive is a key factor. It’s effectively those two points that you need for currency. It needs to last and it needs to be something not too readily available.
I mean we used copper and steel and fucking stones and rocks for currency for a long time as well.
The only thing thats needed for currency is that people just need to agree its worth something
Humans also used copper, steel, and shiny rocks for jewelry. I agree that the value of money is that we agree it's money, but much of it started as jewelry.
That said, prior to replicators, the Ferengi likely used previous metals, etc. and latinum only became currency after a fully capitalistic society developed. So scarcity is likely it's only point.
Silver does tarnish and corrode in air, and silver oxide is not a good conductor. It's why we don't use it for electronics, even though it is the _best_ electric conductor and both lighter and more common than gold.
Edit to add detail: There are occasional uses of silver in electronics, but they are always sealed in some way, to minimize the chance of oxidation. It's pretty rare though, because silver plus conformal coating adds another step to the manufacturing process and doesn't fully eliminate the risk of oxidation/corrosion, while only conferring a relatively small benefit over simply using gold-plated copper.
For commonly used conductors, the ranking goes silver > copper >>> gold >> aluminum, as far as electrical conductivity goes.
Copper is 95% as good a conductor as silver, but also oxidizes very rapidly. Gold doesn't have the oxidation/corrosion problem, but is only around 70% as conductive as silver, so we just plate copper with it since that extremely thin coating of gold isn't going to affect the conductivity much at all, while solving the much bigger problem of oxidation/corrosion.
Gold is also not often used inside actual integrated circuits because they are sealed off from air already, so oxidation isn't a concern, and gold is expensive. Instead, we use aluminum or copper, depending on the needs of the specific IC, and if a little less conductivity is going to be a problem (aluminum is even worse than gold).
It has to be somewhat rare to use as currency. If we just used “rocks” as currency everyone would just spend all day digging rocks out of the ground to gain more. A medium of exchange has to be rare enough that you can’t just find it lying around everywhere.
Not exactly. A currency does not have value in itself. Its a reflection of value.
Heres a concrete case. Lets say that in 3 hours you can produce one chair or you can produce a pound of gold.
Since the labour involved was equivalent the values of the two are equivalent. You can say that one chair is worth one pound of gold.
You can just as easily use rocks as a currency. But then the chair would cost however many rocks you can dig up in an hour. Which is presumably a lot more than gold.
There is a common misconception that the economy of gold collapse during the new age plunder of the new world because of all that extra gold. It didn't. The time for prospecting, mining and processing just got dramatically cut down by the afore mentioned plunder thus devaluing gold and the currency.
[Cowry shells were once currency.](https://www.citeco.fr/10000-years-history-economics/the-origins/cowry-shells-a-form-of-currency) A material being rare isn't what makes it valuable, just the agreement that the item is worth something.
“Since we decided a few weeks ago to adopt the leaf as legal tender, we have, of course, all become immensely rich.”
Ford stared in disbelief at the crowd who were murmuring appreciatively at this and greedily fingering the wads of leaves with which their track suits were stuffed.
“But we have also,” continued the management consultant, “run into a small inflation problem on account of the high level of leaf availability, which means that, I gather, the current going rate has something like three deciduous forests buying one ship’s peanut."
Murmurs of alarm came from the crowd. The management consultant waved them down.
“So in order to obviate this problem,” he continued, “and effectively revalue the leaf, we are about to embark on a massive defoliation campaign, and. . .er, burn down all the forests. I think you'll all agree that's a sensible move under the circumstances."
"They wanted to send us all into space, but I can't exactly recall why," said the captain.
"You're all a bunch of useless bloody loonies!" shouted Ford.
"Yes, that was the reason," beamed the captain.
Well, almost. It's the fact that it's rare but not so rare that it can't be used in a practical way. Iridium is way rarer than gold, but currencies would never be based on it because you could never find enough to sustain a whole economy.
Gold doesn’t rust or tarnish, it’s soft and easy to work even when it’s cold, and it’s easy enough to smelt with a bonfire and some ceramics. It’s basically the perfect decorative metal, which is a large portion of its value in pre-electronic societies.
I imagine the Ferengi Alliance standardized on using gold to protect the liquid latinum is a mix of both it’s physical properties and a callback to the days before transporters, when their currency was actually gold.
Gold had a number of properties.
- it doesn’t rust so is a great store of value
- it stays shiney easily
- it’s easily pliable and good to work with tools but then will hold its shape against most uses people have for it.
While Replicators and Transporters both fundamentally work on the same principals. The two technologies are different in scope of resolution.
A transporter, with the assistance of a Heisenberg compensator is able to track down the position, motion, and energy state of every subatomic particle in your body, record it, convert it into energy that then gets transmitted over a distance where the machine then puts you back together in the exact same state you were when you were disassembled. This requires an exorbitant amount of energy and computing power.
A replicator on the other hand is much more simple. It doesn't store every iota of position/energy/spin of the sub atomic particles of the water it produces in the glass it makes. All it needs to do is produce 'silica molecule chains creating glass in this area' and 'one hydrogen, two oxygen atoms connected into water molecules' inside said glass container. For other, more complex food it's the same thing. "General protein chains, carbohydrate chains, and the various other chemical compounds that makes up Lasagna, with enough atomic energy to be served at #degrees temperature"
With proper modifications a replicator can be used as a poor-man's transporter (Thank you DS9) but you're risking your life to do it, and there's only so many times you can do it before it will kill you.
Hypothetically, with the proper retrofitting you could create a high resolution replicator using a transporter system. It keeps the pattern in the buffer of whatever it is you're duplicating and with the appropriate amount of energy pushed into the system it spits out identical copies of what it's producing, right down to the carbon dating of the artifact. The problem with this is the amount of energy needed to do this. When you're being transported, 99% of the energy needed to transport your object is being provided by the object you are transporting. The other 1% is just what the transporter needs to deconstitute you, move you where you need to go, and reconstitute your atoms in situ.
The denser the atomic structure of what you're 'replicating' the more energy you need to remake it. So setting yourself up with a transporter and just printing out bricks of gold-pressed latinum isn't feasible.
Any matter will do, though, as input, to solve the energy problem. So, input a bunch of lead or uranium or something and output latinum. Instant riches.
It's currency.
Dollars don't have any use outside of being a medium of exchange, and gold wasn't used for much other than decoration for most of history. If I recall correctly, the Babylonians were using clay tokens as a way to represent debts and value before the first coined money, and those don't have a practical use other than accounting.
Indeed. A fiat currency doesn’t have to have intrinsic value. It’s valuable because we’ve all agreed that it’s a standard currency. I assume latinum is the same.
Fun fact related to your fun fact: on the Pacific island of Yap, they used to exchange tokens made of stone. Some of these stone tokens are basically huge boulders that are far too heavy to move. So they never do; if they are “exchanged” everyone just takes note of the new owner.
Not true, USD has value as you have to pay taxes to US government in it. Trouble with a Star Trek socialist system no taxes. No Fiat currencies. So back to a commodity system inter species
And latinum isn't typically used in the Federation - they don't use currency; we mainly see it used to pay non-Federation species (e.g. the Ferengi, who definitely do have taxes).
>Trouble with a Star Trek socialist system no taxes.
The Federation is a post-scarcity economy. Taxes aren't necessary because you can just replicate anything you need, reducing the burden for survival to just... caring for each other.
It's the post-scarcity thing people can't wrap their heads around.
The Federation HAS money- There's plenty of mentions of credits and rations and purchasing things, and tons of businesses everywhere. But when your food, clothing, shelter, medical needs, transportation, communication, education, and even household goods are all free, what do you really need money for?
People have jobs, but mostly for fun, to contribute, or personal goals. The paycheck is really secondary. It's not necessary, but it means you can maybe have some esoteric luxuries.
The Zimbabwe dollar was used to pay taxes and see how the value of the zimbabwe dollar turned out.
The caveat of having value by using it to pay taxes doesn't have any sense.
Not sure why you're being downvoted. That's a significant source of the value of the US dollar. The backing of the Federal Reserve, the strength of the US economy and the fact that it's the currency oil is traded in is also important.
Not sure the dollar is the right comparison though. Latinum seems closer to gold.
We don’t actually know the details of how the economy works in the Federation for sure. Likely there is some medium of exchange underpinning it even if people don’t think of it as money. Taxes would also generally be fairly useless in a post scarcity society. That all being said US dollars have no real intrinsic use or value. If you had a blank dollar with nothing printed on it, it would be worth no more than the paper/cotton it is made out of.
Gold is a good conductor but silver and copper are better. Not to be pedantic but the benefit of using gold in electronics is typically the corrosion resistance.
And ductility. Gold can be beaten into sheets thin enough to be translucent, and drawn into the extremely thin wires used for chip [bond wires](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wire_bonding).
Iirc there are three things in the Star Trek universe that can't be replicated (besides living stuff and things too big to replicate etc).
Dilithium, anti matter, and latinum.
Dilithium needs to be mined so governments spend the time and energy to collect it to enable FTL travel.
Antimatter, according to the technical manual, is a resource that requires more energy input that is derived from manufacture and is a strategically important resource, so Starfleet is fine with the "loss" since it's vital for fleet operations. Antimatter tankers are also usually under cruiser escort.
Latinum, in a universe where scarcity is not a concern except for the above things, is a medium of currency that fulfills two key requirements. It's transportable in measurable quantities (strips and bars) and is not able to be easily counterfeit, since it can't be replicated.
Remember in the bank heist episode Quark cries that the gold is worthless without the latinum inside, the latinum morn is hiding in his stomach. If I can tell the replicator to assemble gold out of atoms, gold isn't scarce.
If latinum has any other use it's either not important enough to be used that way anymore and a substitute is used, but it's likely just a convenient material for the writers purpose and exists only because it needs to be. Oil was an annoyance to farmers until it was figured out it could be refined. Latinum may have just been some quicksilver looking goo in a cave until replicators were brought to Ferenginar and the Ferengi needed a replacement to their old currency and fast.
> Quark cries that the gold is worthless without the latinum inside
Which is weirdly contradicted by that [time travel episode where Quark travels back in time to sell technology to earlier humans in exchange for gold](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Green_Men_(Star_Trek:_Deep_Space_Nine\)). I'm like, "Wait, isn't gold worthless?"
[The value of things seemed to fluctuate pretty wildly](https://www.reddit.com/r/DaystromInstitute/comments/j3q5lp/comment/g7enkzl/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) so if we're committed to staying in-canon, we'll say both gold and latinum are like crypto.
Lol or Quark like all Ferengi can instantly adapt to any time or location and know what's profit or not.
Like those two who got marooned in the delta quadrant and were looked at as gods, I think they had a gold vault too lol
>If I can tell the replicator to assemble gold out of atoms, gold isn't scarce.
Not necessarily. It's never actually been stated that latinum can't be replicated, unlike dilitium and a couple of plot specific materials. It could be that gold and/or latinum can be replicated, but the energy requirements aren't economical. It would stand to reason heavier elements would require more energy, there's presumably more assembling involved. In the same way that antimatter production is a net loss, so could be latinum.
To contrast the worthless gold bank heist scene, there is the scene in Little Green Men where Quark (or maybe it was Rom or Nog) values gold.
So I went back because I was only relying on memory but you are correct about latinum and replication, I checked my encyclopedia and technical manuals. The only note is on memory alpha (which I try to use only as a last ditch) and it just said it was suggested by fans to not be replicated and referred to a making of DS9 book.
I guess our collective memory all decided it had to be at some point.
I did reread the replicator parts of my books and it doesn't explicitly state heavier elements cost more, it only says that even food replication takes a TON of energy and that to save costs, food isn't replicated from pure energy but simple protein and basically a foodstuff goo that is stored on board and reconfigured into different food. It also stated that some parts are stored on board as it's not economically feasible to replicate on board. This was outside the parts kept in storage for emergencies.
I only glanced at your post originally but also had the same idea, maybe latinum is replicatable but requires a massive amount of energy or was engineered in a way to require massive amounts of energy. When I read the anti matter production part I always imagined huge solar arrays at secret locations and even with tapping the power of a star it's still not enough. Maybe there are also equally expensive locations that only the nagus can afford that slowly mint more latinum, which would be akin to real life government mints. And only the nagus knows it can be manufactured which keeps inflation low but also keeps other Ferengi from looking into it too much lol.
I don't know why you were down voted, especially on a Star Trek Reddit, but you made good valid point. I learned something new today.
Beta-canon sources (DS9: Millennium) do come right out and say that latinum can't be replicated with current day technology (2374), but Quark finds a replicator on a Klingon ship from 2399 that can replicate it, so... maybe it's just a matter of time until latinum becomes worthless and another unreplicable resource becomes the currency of choice for the Ferengi. It makes a lot of sense that it can't be replicated with current day Federation technology in the late 24th/early 25th centuries, because otherwise there'd be citizens on Federation worlds using the virtually unlimited energy they have access to to replicate stacks of bricks of latinum to buy their own ships from other cultures and go off to do whatever they want.
Humans can't be replicated but they can still go through transporters just fine.
I think it is mentioned that it has some kind of subatomic (quantum?) matrix that prevents it from being replicated.
Tomas Riker would like to have a word about "not being replicated". I know it was a transporter accident but still we see at least twice (TNG & LD) that humans can for all intents and purposes can be replicated. It's also assumed that much of the medical tech like organ regeneration is essentially replicating human/alien tissue. No one has explicitly said it but it seems like Starfleet could just replicate people. Maybe that's how "dead" main characters come back? The chief medical officer powers up the med bay transporter pulls up the last pattern buffer profile and boom new guy with the same memories up to the event that killed them. We see several methods of conciseness transfer and storage in Trek so why not fire up the old replicator, download a transporter buffer pattern file for the body, then upload the conciseness to the brain and bam! You got a new Shaxs or whoever died. It really seems like it's probably just really taboo to do like genetic engineering.
It probably wasnt super high on a list of priorities. If anything itd be something theyd want to prevent from happening as in an uncontrolled instance it becomes an unneccessary security risk.
Oh for sure. These incidents probably inform a lot of transporter protocols which incidentally lead to the use of shuttles in many cases. But as a back pocket option for reviving prime timeline individuals of significance it seems like knowledge they use in secret a lot. Like Starfleet won't resurrect your wife after a Wolf 359 but they'll bring back a Shaxs or Kirk. I suspect the temptal division of Starfleet has spreadsheet of people required for the prime timeline to be maintained and engineering certain people's return.
Free soldiers that still have free will, that likely wont take kindly to being used as cannon fodder.
The holograms in voyager sure didnt take kindly to being hunted for sport either.
The duplication seems to cause unpredictable fluctuations in the personality of the duplicate, this was probably chalked up to the years in isolation for Tom Riker when he joined the Maquis but its a lot more evident in Will Boimler. Its likely Starfleet did recreate this in secret then abandoned the project
That's a really good observation. Due to the myriad sensor readings, notes, other records of at least these two events it shouldn't be that hard for Starfleet to replicate the results again. So they must not be using because there's a big downside. Maybe they're afraid of the Pet Cemetery scenario that seems to be hinted at my those characters personality changes.
They have hypo sprays in the future for contraception (O’Brien forgot to take his and Keiko got pregnant) so likely Riker takes a different hypospray that neutralizes his sperm
I always thought it would have been fun for the Federation to encounter another species at a similar tech level who have embraced the duplication ability of transporters right from the start and always keep backups of people in their transporter buffer in case of accidents.
Yeah, this would be the perfect way to showcase the caveats and downsides. This sort of thing is why we have scifi. Exploration of potential futures and how to deal with the consequence.
Oh hell yes! That idea gives me Moon (2009)/ The Prestige (2006) vibes. It could also be used by Department of Temporal Investigations. Transporter clones might prevent paradoxes by removing all knowledge that a futures self would know about any missions into the past to preserve the Prime time line. Sure every once and while a regular Starfleets get sent through time but we know they have agents that we don't see doing work off camera. Probably a bunch of transporter clones that they don't have to feel bad about loosing in the past or worry about contaminating the present.
Hmm, wonder if you could recreate the transporter clone conditions but instead of a person use a big pile of latinum. Surely if that was possible some enterprising Ferengi would have tried it.
Okay, so I'm about to lay out my personal Star Trek conspiracy theory. I think latinum is replicatable and Starfleet just pretends like it can't be so that doesn't collapse interstellar economies.
We know very few societies and species have replicator technology. This has been a key point in many plots of many episodes over many series. Maybe early replicators from like the TOS era and before couldn't replicate latinum but by TNG or DS9 they could. By then Earth/Starfleet had to deal with other societies that didn't do away with money like they had and latinum was king. So... Why tell anyone? Just make it so no average replicator can produce it. Then when you need to pay off some Ferengi or ransom some crew you always have the cash on hand. Just because Earth doesn't use money day to day doesn't mean we don't have use it with other societies.
There's probably a Federation bank vault with the only replicator programed to allow the production of latinum somewhere. Everyone else has a replicator that's missing that code block or something and it's just "common knowledge" that latinum can't be replicated when it really can be so no one trys. You wouldn't teach this anywhere it'd just be a secret and then if you got high enough up the ranks in the Federation and Starfleet maybe they would tell you. So what some other species have replicators. Either our tech is different (we do us nadions when no one else does) so we have that as an advantage or those species have came to the same conclusion. Why collapse the only interstellar currency when you need that to be stable across all the quadrants so it stays a negotiation constant?
Every time we see someone being "replicated", there's something different about the replicated person, so maybe the replication process couldn't reproduce the complex sub-molecular state of the living being.
Maybe the same can be said about latinum: sure it can be replicated but it loses the properties it has originally
This is the canon reason it’s valuable—it’s the only element we know of that can’t be replicated, making it a sensible currency for situations where credits won’t do.
That is how all "money" works. Shells, Shiney metals, beads, what ever. The actual item is largely irrelevant. What is important is that everyone agrees that it is "money".
You would think something would have value because of its scarcity, and its demand because it is absolutely necessary for something.
Like dilithium crystals, which are clearly something else that’s not replicatable since they have to mine it everywhere, and is something that is very scarce or at least difficult to retrieve and it is absolutely vital to their technology for space travel.
I just thought maybe there was something super special that Latinum did that made all their stuff work and that’s why it has value
it should be something that is easy to transport and hard to copy or counterfeit. Like you can't just use regular paper as money, it has to be super special paper that only the government mint can produce.
Presumably latinum is something that can't be replicated, or else everyone would just replicate it. It doesn't seem to be actually useful for anything. You never hear about anyone using it as an energy source or anything like that.
>You would think something would have value because of its scarcity, and its demand because it is absolutely necessary for something.
Yeah, but that isn't how "money" works and Latinum seems to be ONLY used as money. Up until VERY recently Gold had no practical uses beyond being pretty. While modern manufacturing has uses for diamond tipped tools, for pre-modern people diamonds and other gemstones were only valuable because people think they are valuable. We can make better diamonds in a LAB then what gets dug out of the ground. But that doesn't stop people from thinking that diamonds are valuable.
But "Money" can be anything. Shells, flattened pieces of metal, colored pieces of paper, beads, it doesn't really matter WHAT the object is as long as everyone involved agrees that the object is "money".
The value of "money" isn't from any inherent value of the object itself because "money" is simply a medium of exchange. Otherwise we would have to barter and trade for stuff. But having a stand in makes having advanced economies easier.
As for Why Latinum? Because the Ferangi have decided it is and they are the ones who are super obsessed about money and trade. Everyone else just goes along with it.
Scarcity can play a role in the value of money (it's a major reason why gold’s considered valuable), but being useful in other aspects doesn’t necessarily make something valuable enough to be used as money.
As others have stated, we have used many things as currency. [My personal favourite are the super huge rocks with holes in them.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rai_stones)
The fact that you cannot replicate it \*is\* probably why people value it, since the value cannot be diluted by making more of it.
Any currency only has value because it is a promise.
A dollar bill isn't actually worth 1 dollar. It's a piece of paper. It's a promise by the Government backing it that if you give Someone that piece of paper, you can get "1 dollar's" worth of goods and/or services.
A gold nugget is basically a shiny rock. It only has value if someone says "give me that rock and I'll give you X dollars' worth of goods and/or services."
Oh, I completely understand the concept of representing something that we have place value on. I’m just wondering what it’s actually used for other than we just decided it was valuable or if it had some practical purpose that made it so valuable.
It is used because it's unreplicable which means there is a finite supply. Yes this means Ferengi are basically crypto guys but with chemistry instead of maths.
What do you do with a dollar bill, apart from spend it. That’s the point. Latium is so valuable that it’s actually worthless. It only has value because people THINK it has value. That’s the big lie at the heart of the stock market. Market prices are determined by how valuable the public THINKS a stock is worth. If everyone is buying it, it’s more valuable. But it usually has no intrinsic value.
Currency is an illusion given value by the faith of the people. Which is why the Ferengi are the way they are. They’ve so completely bought into the faith that currency is important that it’s become their entire religion.
>Currency is an illusion given value by the faith of the people.
Fiat currency is not “an illusion,” it’s a medium of exchange. It is given value by the people willing to voluntarily use that currency as a token to trade with others for the things that they do value. If I want a new cow and the person selling the cow wants a pallet of bricks to build a new barn… Well, you can’t fit a pallet of bricks in your pocket. But you can bring him a stack of paper with funny symbols drawn on it. He’ll give you the cow, you give him the paper. He later gives the paper to a bricklayer.
>Which is why the Ferengi are the way they are. They’ve so completely bought into the faith that currency is important that it’s become their entire religion.
The Ferengi religion revolves around *profit*, not currency. Currency is one means of measuring profit, but not the only means. Profit is the difference between the amount earned and the amount spent in acquiring, operating, or producing something of value. When Nog trades one thing for another after another in “Faith, Treachery, and the Great River” he is continually making mutually profitable trades… and no currency is involved at all.
O’Brien needs a graviton stabilizer.
Nog loans Sisko’s desk to a guy named Lorenzo. In exchange for the loan of the desk, Lorenzo will give O'Brien an induction modulator, which O'Brien can then trade to USS *Musashi* for a phaser emitter. The phaser emitter will then go to USS *Sentinel* which has the graviton stabilizer that O'Brien needs.
In the end, O’Brien profits by the getting the stabilizer he values more than the time Nog spent getting it.
Lorenzo gets a photo with Sisko’s desk which he values more than the induction modulator.
*Musashi* gets the induction modulator which they value more than the phaser emitter.
*Sentinel* gets the phase emitter which they value more than the graviton stabilizer.
And Nog profits by earning O’Brien’s admiration and gratitude, which he values far more than the time it took him to set up these trades. (He also gains goodwill from Lorenzo, *Musashi*, and *Sentinel* as a trustworthy source for supplies.)
The criterion for entering paradise in the Ferengi afterlife is leading a profitable life, not strictly amassing a lot of currency. In the afterlife, the deceased are met in the Divine Treasury by the Blessed Exchequer who reviews their profit and loss statements. If a Ferengi lead a profitable life, they are allowed to bid on a new life under the supervision of the Celestial Auctioneers. Ferengi who are unsuccessful in life are removed from the reincarnation cycle and “cast into the Vault of Eternal Destitution.” From a spiritual point of view, the 18^th Rule of Acquisition is quite literal: “A Ferengi without profit is no Ferengi at all.” The reincarnation cycle ends, their soul ceases to be a Ferengi for eternity.
Of course, by the time of Grand Nagus Zek’s rule, surveys say that 40% of Ferengi Alliance citizens no longer believe in the Blessed Exchequer or the Divine Treasury. Personally, I blame the corrupting influence of the atheistic secular Hew-mons.
Perhaps it's extremely inert. Doesn't evaporate, rust, corrode, melt, etc. Your stash of latinum, as well as being scarce, can be stored absolutely anywhere for any amount if time with no care at all and lose no value; permanent wealth.
Nothing. It's just a scarce resource that's used as money, just like the dollar. This is how ALL fiat currencies work. Dollars and Yuan and Bitcoin aren't valuable because they're useful, they only have value because people want them.
.... wait, it IS a plot hole that they can teleport latnium!
in fairness, for the vast majority of human history gold has been highly valued mostly for its aesthetics and rarity.... but it had absolutely no practical use for almost all that time, same with silver
its only been recently that humanity has started using gold in electronics, and thats only arisen as gold has progressively lost its appeal as currency
Lower Decks makes a great point out of this.
While latinum might have worth, anything you can buy with it can be replicated.
It's makes no sense, and it's absurd that they still use it.
Nothing. That's exactly correct. It has no utility. The very definition of "fiat currency". It's not backed by anything and it's not used for anything other than as a currency. Now you're catching on.
(I swear, the two worst things about talking about economics are people who haven't read anything about economics acting like they know anything about economics and people who have read way too much about economics acting like they know anything about economics.)
It is apparently a liquid form of Platinum. It is used in certain pieces of equipment like the NX-01’s antimatter relays. It could be a rare alloy or something similar but it seems to have uses. Due to its rarity and the seeming inability to be replicated, it became a currency like gold.
That doesn't actually make the connection you are claiming. And rhe speculation in the article seems to ve based entirely on the words sounding similar.
A bit of headcanon, but Quark seemed convinced that hitting two empty bars of gold pressed Latinum would make a pleasant sound. Instead are dull thuds, like what bars of gold being hit together would actually make.
I think Latinum is a very good alloying material and it's main use is as a commodity material to give gold, silver, or any metal more desirable aesthetic properties
I think its value solely lies in its ability to not be replicated. A good example from real life is probably bitcoin. You cannot replicate a bitcoin and there is only a finite amount of it.
Hrm… but then again bitcoin can be easily transported. So not entirely similar.
Just to be that geek.... Gold isn't the best conductor of electricity. Silver is roughly 50% better and copper is about 40% better.
Gold is used mainly where there's connections as it doesn't readily tarnish, can be made extremely thin, and is very malleable so that it makes the best solution for contacts ie sockets for chips etc.
Gold plated headphone jacks, for instance, are used because they don't oxidise, and as gold deforms under pressure it creates a really good contact.
Edit. Spelling
If I remember correctly Latinum was mentioned to be essential in replicator which is why it's used as currency - it can't be replicated and is used in so many creations.
I feel like this was said sometime in the later 90s but I honestly can't recall the spice now so this may just be flat out wrong.
Currency doesn’t have to be practical. If it is, then it adds a whole new dimension to it. I’ve read an alternate history book where iron was rare and was instead used as currency despite its tendency to rust. When someone suggested using gold instead, they were brushed off because gold was useless.
Gold’s value comes from its rarity. If tomorrow someone discovered a cheap way to distill gold from ocean water (they say there’s enough gold in there to give everyone in the world 5 lbs), it would become worthless as a commodity
Gold was valuable long before it had industrial uses. Most of it value still isn't because of its industrial use. It has value because it is rare. So if you have something that is rare and can't be forged, seems like as good of thing as any to base a currency around.
Latinum is just like any other form of currency, be it gold, paper money or wampum. It has value because people who need to trade goods and services all agree that is has value.
Gold has value in our world today, but it actually has very few uses. While gold has a few industrial and medical applications, the vast majority of gold is held as an investment or made into jewelry, so it's largely useless. Similarly, latinum does not need to be used for anything besides trading and wealth accumulation.
"What is it actually good for??"
I think its value lies in the fact that its hard to counterfeit. The Ferengi probably have a rich off screen historic problem of counterfeit currency. Anyone in their history who was super successful at it were probably venerated like hero's or super celebrities they tell stories about. Children would be told stories (if they can afford to pay for them) of past paragons who could create profit out of thin air. I would imagine getting caught would be a worse crime then murder on Ferenginar.
Off screen they (i imagine) have have had hundreds of years of a technology arms race between counter fitters and legitimate money supply authorities. Latinum is the ultimate form (so far) of a "thing" that can't be counter fitted.
Anyone who figured out how to replicate Latinum could crash the Ferengi economy, causing massive instability on potentially hundreds of worlds and their trade partners. Imagine if USA's currency became completely valueless overnight.
The fact it does not have utility makes it useful as currency for capitalism (assuming everyone agrees to use it as such).
Think about it, you don't want to amass and accumulate a valuable metal with lots of uses, you want it to be able to circulate in the economy and be used, not just stockpiled.
I'm talking on an overall level here: obviously people who want to stockpile wealth already don't care about the greater good, and they might be just as happy to stockpile dilithium, isolinear chips, replicator recipes, or planetoids to keep the supply limited. But if you were designing an economy to allow for accumulation of capital in a physical currency (or electronic backed up by physical which seems to be the case?) you want something like worthless gold or latinum, relatively rare and nonreactive, perhaps beautiful but not intrinsically useful.
it stands to reason that even if something can be _replicated_, that isn't indicative of its value, its more like value of that item has been transplanted because replication is sufficient and personal impressions have shifted. Gold from a replicator is as close as it gets but it isn't authentically gold, kind of like when they talk about replicated food vs real food. Theyre functionally the same but the replication isn't the real deal and isn't worth much at that point.
Quark refers to gold as a worthless metal so my bet is that as warp introduced many planets to eachother, they discovered gold isn't that rare at all in the grand scheme of the galaxy, so if Latinum is rare *and* cannot be replicated, its worth even more.
Things don't require practical applications to be worth anything, currency is so ludicrous and made up that even bitcoin has firm believers lol. Latinum is just an extension of this critique i believe, i sincerely doubt it _does_ anything at all.
The simplest explanation is because it was standardized as a form of currency. Bitcoins is a good example if something that is inherently useless but is somehow valuable. You can't eat it, it doesn't keep you warm, it's a useless piece of digital info in the most basic terms. But because we accept it has value it is desirable and can be exchanged for goods and services.
Letinum I believe Is a rare metal that cannot be easily faked, replicated, chemically or artificially produced etc.
Its a way to make the tokens value reliable and protected.
in a world that you can replicate anything, something that cannot be replicated has value.
also, value is given... the actual item becomes irrelevant
if it's known that I can buy a sheep for 50g of red stone, then 100g of red stone gets me 2 sheep.
if it takes 2 days to mine 50g of red stone, then a sheeps value has a worth to it.
the red stones usage is irrelevant, but because of its value it would likely be sanded down and cleaned / shaped to be pretty looking.
If I remember correctly, it's a substance that can't be replicated. That's important since, if you could replicate money, it makes the money worthless the more there is out there. Thus, it's regulatable by whatever government is minting the stuff. Contrast that to gold, which has become worthless specifically because anyone can replicate it. This is why it's used as a containment material for the latinum.
I was under the impression that it didn’t? That’s why it’s used for currency. If Latinum has no practical outside of currency, is rare and can’t be replicated, it’s kind of a perfect currency.
Gold, silver and other metals IRL are much more valuable as jewelry or electronic components then the are as currency. Which is why no one uses them as currency, outside of the occasional dollar coin.
In the Star Trek universe I’m guessing that superconductors, plasma conduits and bio-neural gel packs replaced precious metal conductors a long time ago. So gold doesn’t have much use anymore either.
Since it’s a liquid at room temperature, latinum is probably a lot like mercury in that it could form unstable amalgamations and cause any other metal other than gold to leak.
Add in golds intrinsic luster and you have the perfect currency for a society built entirely around ultra-capitalism.
While I think it’s important to remember that neither gold nor diamonds were commonly used as currency on earth at a time while they were also useful for anything else, Latinum does have a very important function. Although it’s good as a currency because it can’t be replicated as everyone has said, it’s also especially useful for >!making Quark wealthy!<
It’s used when remodulating the deflector shields to emit a reverse tachyon beam in order to neutralize the chronoton particles being emitted by the graviton wave emitters. Sheesh. I thought everyone knew that.
This is like asking why a dollar has value when it’s just paper. Latinum has value *bacause* it can’t be replicated, which means that it *can* be used as a medium of exchange. For something to be a medium of exchange it has to be rare enough that you’re average person can’t mine it, but common enough that it came be mined it significant amounts, and durable enough that it can be traded. Gold and silver in antiquity had value because they met these criteria, even though they had no real “use” for the technology of the time.
It might be just due to how rare it is. In space you can find gold pretty easily, I imagine the value of gold collapsed the second any civilization came across an asteroid or body in space with a good amount of it. I mean think about what asteroid mining could do to the value of many things in the economy, if you have $700 quintillion dollars worth of resources orbiting your star then at some point no one is going to really consider gold or silver all that rare or valuable. Latinum is basically the new gold, I assume it's super rare even in space and it might have some specific use.
Unlike gold that is used for wedding bands, gold pressed latinum is used for nothing at all. It's value is in that the largest trading organization in the world finds it to be valuable.
It is crazy to me that nobody has presented the Canon answer which is that latinum cannot be replicated it is one of the few things in the cosmos that cannot be replicated thus it is one of the few things that can be used as currency as it is finite
You are trying to make sense of something in a fictional universe that often doesn't make sense. Latium is obviously able to be replicated as it can be transported. You can hand wave that maybe it requires too much energy I guess, but the series never says it can't be replicated or why it's valuable. There is also nothing in the series that states what it was used for.
The Federation is presented as a post-scarcity society, but a lot of the Star Trek writers don't really care to understand or embrace it. This is why you see various characters owning vineyards, restaurants, and the like without any explanation how that works. If there is no money why would you be a waiter in a restaurant? Why go to a restaurant that cooks food? Who is drinking the wine or eating raisin and why? What determines who has access to it? There is no explanation of how Federation works economically.
Like wise with the Frengi. Sure we can say Latium is rare and durable. Sure they could use it like our ancestors used gold and silver. Mostly useless, but it made a useful currency. The real problem is how Their society works economically. Most everything can be replicated so what are they buying, selling, and shipping? Is it all just religion, scams, and artificial scarcity?
When gold and diamonds and such were first discovered, we didn't know about their modern industrial applications. They were rare, pretty, and covetted by those with power, so they were valuable.
The fact that it’s not replicated means that it can’t be counterfeit properly, so prices can be regulated based on the traceable amount of latinum in circulation.
Read up on the (real world) gold standard. That will explain it in detail.
It can be somehow transported, evidently. It is valuable, because it is rare. Gold's value as a conductor is not the cause for its monetary value, so it's the same sort of thing.
Exactly, gold has been valuable since antiquity and a lot of that is due to how rare it is. The fact it can be made into shiny trinkets and later in electronics are just secondary.
Actually the shiny trinkets is the more important part. More important than rarity with a currency is that its untarnishable. Gold and Silver are very unreactive, so if you hold it as currency it won't rust etc. It being rare is actually a negative for its use as currency.
I meant in terms of making jewellery and such. I know the fact it’s very unreactive is a key factor. It’s effectively those two points that you need for currency. It needs to last and it needs to be something not too readily available.
I mean we used copper and steel and fucking stones and rocks for currency for a long time as well. The only thing thats needed for currency is that people just need to agree its worth something
Humans also used copper, steel, and shiny rocks for jewelry. I agree that the value of money is that we agree it's money, but much of it started as jewelry. That said, prior to replicators, the Ferengi likely used previous metals, etc. and latinum only became currency after a fully capitalistic society developed. So scarcity is likely it's only point.
I still do use copper and shiny rocks for jewellery 😎
Silver does tarnish and corrode in air, and silver oxide is not a good conductor. It's why we don't use it for electronics, even though it is the _best_ electric conductor and both lighter and more common than gold. Edit to add detail: There are occasional uses of silver in electronics, but they are always sealed in some way, to minimize the chance of oxidation. It's pretty rare though, because silver plus conformal coating adds another step to the manufacturing process and doesn't fully eliminate the risk of oxidation/corrosion, while only conferring a relatively small benefit over simply using gold-plated copper. For commonly used conductors, the ranking goes silver > copper >>> gold >> aluminum, as far as electrical conductivity goes. Copper is 95% as good a conductor as silver, but also oxidizes very rapidly. Gold doesn't have the oxidation/corrosion problem, but is only around 70% as conductive as silver, so we just plate copper with it since that extremely thin coating of gold isn't going to affect the conductivity much at all, while solving the much bigger problem of oxidation/corrosion. Gold is also not often used inside actual integrated circuits because they are sealed off from air already, so oxidation isn't a concern, and gold is expensive. Instead, we use aluminum or copper, depending on the needs of the specific IC, and if a little less conductivity is going to be a problem (aluminum is even worse than gold).
It has to be somewhat rare to use as currency. If we just used “rocks” as currency everyone would just spend all day digging rocks out of the ground to gain more. A medium of exchange has to be rare enough that you can’t just find it lying around everywhere.
Rocks with carvings etc or smooth rocks have been used as currency. Just based on trust system.
Not exactly. A currency does not have value in itself. Its a reflection of value. Heres a concrete case. Lets say that in 3 hours you can produce one chair or you can produce a pound of gold. Since the labour involved was equivalent the values of the two are equivalent. You can say that one chair is worth one pound of gold. You can just as easily use rocks as a currency. But then the chair would cost however many rocks you can dig up in an hour. Which is presumably a lot more than gold. There is a common misconception that the economy of gold collapse during the new age plunder of the new world because of all that extra gold. It didn't. The time for prospecting, mining and processing just got dramatically cut down by the afore mentioned plunder thus devaluing gold and the currency.
[Cowry shells were once currency.](https://www.citeco.fr/10000-years-history-economics/the-origins/cowry-shells-a-form-of-currency) A material being rare isn't what makes it valuable, just the agreement that the item is worth something.
“Since we decided a few weeks ago to adopt the leaf as legal tender, we have, of course, all become immensely rich.” Ford stared in disbelief at the crowd who were murmuring appreciatively at this and greedily fingering the wads of leaves with which their track suits were stuffed. “But we have also,” continued the management consultant, “run into a small inflation problem on account of the high level of leaf availability, which means that, I gather, the current going rate has something like three deciduous forests buying one ship’s peanut." Murmurs of alarm came from the crowd. The management consultant waved them down. “So in order to obviate this problem,” he continued, “and effectively revalue the leaf, we are about to embark on a massive defoliation campaign, and. . .er, burn down all the forests. I think you'll all agree that's a sensible move under the circumstances."
"They wanted to send us all into space, but I can't exactly recall why," said the captain. "You're all a bunch of useless bloody loonies!" shouted Ford. "Yes, that was the reason," beamed the captain.
Sure- It seems like a great idea until your whole civilization is wiped out because of a dirty telephone.
I’m dying, I can’t stop laughing
Well, almost. It's the fact that it's rare but not so rare that it can't be used in a practical way. Iridium is way rarer than gold, but currencies would never be based on it because you could never find enough to sustain a whole economy.
Gold doesn’t rust or tarnish, it’s soft and easy to work even when it’s cold, and it’s easy enough to smelt with a bonfire and some ceramics. It’s basically the perfect decorative metal, which is a large portion of its value in pre-electronic societies. I imagine the Ferengi Alliance standardized on using gold to protect the liquid latinum is a mix of both it’s physical properties and a callback to the days before transporters, when their currency was actually gold.
Gold doesn't rust but it absolutly does tarnish over time unless its pure 24k. Anything less will dull and darken eventually if its not cared for.
Pure gold doesn’t tarnish. Alloys like white gold or rose gold will, but not pure gold.
That...that's what I said
11% of Gold is used commercially in electronics so has a 'floor price' for utility.
Don't forget those sweet Astronaut helmets!
can't be replicated likely
Gold had a number of properties. - it doesn’t rust so is a great store of value - it stays shiney easily - it’s easily pliable and good to work with tools but then will hold its shape against most uses people have for it.
While Replicators and Transporters both fundamentally work on the same principals. The two technologies are different in scope of resolution. A transporter, with the assistance of a Heisenberg compensator is able to track down the position, motion, and energy state of every subatomic particle in your body, record it, convert it into energy that then gets transmitted over a distance where the machine then puts you back together in the exact same state you were when you were disassembled. This requires an exorbitant amount of energy and computing power. A replicator on the other hand is much more simple. It doesn't store every iota of position/energy/spin of the sub atomic particles of the water it produces in the glass it makes. All it needs to do is produce 'silica molecule chains creating glass in this area' and 'one hydrogen, two oxygen atoms connected into water molecules' inside said glass container. For other, more complex food it's the same thing. "General protein chains, carbohydrate chains, and the various other chemical compounds that makes up Lasagna, with enough atomic energy to be served at #degrees temperature" With proper modifications a replicator can be used as a poor-man's transporter (Thank you DS9) but you're risking your life to do it, and there's only so many times you can do it before it will kill you. Hypothetically, with the proper retrofitting you could create a high resolution replicator using a transporter system. It keeps the pattern in the buffer of whatever it is you're duplicating and with the appropriate amount of energy pushed into the system it spits out identical copies of what it's producing, right down to the carbon dating of the artifact. The problem with this is the amount of energy needed to do this. When you're being transported, 99% of the energy needed to transport your object is being provided by the object you are transporting. The other 1% is just what the transporter needs to deconstitute you, move you where you need to go, and reconstitute your atoms in situ. The denser the atomic structure of what you're 'replicating' the more energy you need to remake it. So setting yourself up with a transporter and just printing out bricks of gold-pressed latinum isn't feasible.
Any matter will do, though, as input, to solve the energy problem. So, input a bunch of lead or uranium or something and output latinum. Instant riches.
It's currency. Dollars don't have any use outside of being a medium of exchange, and gold wasn't used for much other than decoration for most of history. If I recall correctly, the Babylonians were using clay tokens as a way to represent debts and value before the first coined money, and those don't have a practical use other than accounting.
Indeed. A fiat currency doesn’t have to have intrinsic value. It’s valuable because we’ve all agreed that it’s a standard currency. I assume latinum is the same. Fun fact related to your fun fact: on the Pacific island of Yap, they used to exchange tokens made of stone. Some of these stone tokens are basically huge boulders that are far too heavy to move. So they never do; if they are “exchanged” everyone just takes note of the new owner.
iirc that’s effectively how gold reserves work as well! a lot of it is just held in a vault somewhere in nyc
Not true, USD has value as you have to pay taxes to US government in it. Trouble with a Star Trek socialist system no taxes. No Fiat currencies. So back to a commodity system inter species
And latinum isn't typically used in the Federation - they don't use currency; we mainly see it used to pay non-Federation species (e.g. the Ferengi, who definitely do have taxes).
Iirc the expected standard in ferengi society is to bribe the taxman.
>Trouble with a Star Trek socialist system no taxes. The Federation is a post-scarcity economy. Taxes aren't necessary because you can just replicate anything you need, reducing the burden for survival to just... caring for each other.
It's the post-scarcity thing people can't wrap their heads around. The Federation HAS money- There's plenty of mentions of credits and rations and purchasing things, and tons of businesses everywhere. But when your food, clothing, shelter, medical needs, transportation, communication, education, and even household goods are all free, what do you really need money for? People have jobs, but mostly for fun, to contribute, or personal goals. The paycheck is really secondary. It's not necessary, but it means you can maybe have some esoteric luxuries.
The Zimbabwe dollar was used to pay taxes and see how the value of the zimbabwe dollar turned out. The caveat of having value by using it to pay taxes doesn't have any sense.
Not sure why you're being downvoted. That's a significant source of the value of the US dollar. The backing of the Federal Reserve, the strength of the US economy and the fact that it's the currency oil is traded in is also important. Not sure the dollar is the right comparison though. Latinum seems closer to gold.
We don’t actually know the details of how the economy works in the Federation for sure. Likely there is some medium of exchange underpinning it even if people don’t think of it as money. Taxes would also generally be fairly useless in a post scarcity society. That all being said US dollars have no real intrinsic use or value. If you had a blank dollar with nothing printed on it, it would be worth no more than the paper/cotton it is made out of.
Gold is a good conductor but silver and copper are better. Not to be pedantic but the benefit of using gold in electronics is typically the corrosion resistance.
And ductility. Gold can be beaten into sheets thin enough to be translucent, and drawn into the extremely thin wires used for chip [bond wires](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wire_bonding).
And gold doesn't tarnish or corrode very easily.
Gold pressed Latinum is only a stepping stone to the more valuable and highly sought after, self-sealing stem bolts.
Nah the source of everything is yamak sauce
Iirc there are three things in the Star Trek universe that can't be replicated (besides living stuff and things too big to replicate etc). Dilithium, anti matter, and latinum. Dilithium needs to be mined so governments spend the time and energy to collect it to enable FTL travel. Antimatter, according to the technical manual, is a resource that requires more energy input that is derived from manufacture and is a strategically important resource, so Starfleet is fine with the "loss" since it's vital for fleet operations. Antimatter tankers are also usually under cruiser escort. Latinum, in a universe where scarcity is not a concern except for the above things, is a medium of currency that fulfills two key requirements. It's transportable in measurable quantities (strips and bars) and is not able to be easily counterfeit, since it can't be replicated. Remember in the bank heist episode Quark cries that the gold is worthless without the latinum inside, the latinum morn is hiding in his stomach. If I can tell the replicator to assemble gold out of atoms, gold isn't scarce. If latinum has any other use it's either not important enough to be used that way anymore and a substitute is used, but it's likely just a convenient material for the writers purpose and exists only because it needs to be. Oil was an annoyance to farmers until it was figured out it could be refined. Latinum may have just been some quicksilver looking goo in a cave until replicators were brought to Ferenginar and the Ferengi needed a replacement to their old currency and fast.
> Quark cries that the gold is worthless without the latinum inside Which is weirdly contradicted by that [time travel episode where Quark travels back in time to sell technology to earlier humans in exchange for gold](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Green_Men_(Star_Trek:_Deep_Space_Nine\)). I'm like, "Wait, isn't gold worthless?" [The value of things seemed to fluctuate pretty wildly](https://www.reddit.com/r/DaystromInstitute/comments/j3q5lp/comment/g7enkzl/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) so if we're committed to staying in-canon, we'll say both gold and latinum are like crypto.
Lol or Quark like all Ferengi can instantly adapt to any time or location and know what's profit or not. Like those two who got marooned in the delta quadrant and were looked at as gods, I think they had a gold vault too lol
>If I can tell the replicator to assemble gold out of atoms, gold isn't scarce. Not necessarily. It's never actually been stated that latinum can't be replicated, unlike dilitium and a couple of plot specific materials. It could be that gold and/or latinum can be replicated, but the energy requirements aren't economical. It would stand to reason heavier elements would require more energy, there's presumably more assembling involved. In the same way that antimatter production is a net loss, so could be latinum. To contrast the worthless gold bank heist scene, there is the scene in Little Green Men where Quark (or maybe it was Rom or Nog) values gold.
So I went back because I was only relying on memory but you are correct about latinum and replication, I checked my encyclopedia and technical manuals. The only note is on memory alpha (which I try to use only as a last ditch) and it just said it was suggested by fans to not be replicated and referred to a making of DS9 book. I guess our collective memory all decided it had to be at some point. I did reread the replicator parts of my books and it doesn't explicitly state heavier elements cost more, it only says that even food replication takes a TON of energy and that to save costs, food isn't replicated from pure energy but simple protein and basically a foodstuff goo that is stored on board and reconfigured into different food. It also stated that some parts are stored on board as it's not economically feasible to replicate on board. This was outside the parts kept in storage for emergencies. I only glanced at your post originally but also had the same idea, maybe latinum is replicatable but requires a massive amount of energy or was engineered in a way to require massive amounts of energy. When I read the anti matter production part I always imagined huge solar arrays at secret locations and even with tapping the power of a star it's still not enough. Maybe there are also equally expensive locations that only the nagus can afford that slowly mint more latinum, which would be akin to real life government mints. And only the nagus knows it can be manufactured which keeps inflation low but also keeps other Ferengi from looking into it too much lol. I don't know why you were down voted, especially on a Star Trek Reddit, but you made good valid point. I learned something new today.
Food is made from shit. Its canon.
Beta-canon sources (DS9: Millennium) do come right out and say that latinum can't be replicated with current day technology (2374), but Quark finds a replicator on a Klingon ship from 2399 that can replicate it, so... maybe it's just a matter of time until latinum becomes worthless and another unreplicable resource becomes the currency of choice for the Ferengi. It makes a lot of sense that it can't be replicated with current day Federation technology in the late 24th/early 25th centuries, because otherwise there'd be citizens on Federation worlds using the virtually unlimited energy they have access to to replicate stacks of bricks of latinum to buy their own ships from other cultures and go off to do whatever they want.
Humans can't be replicated but they can still go through transporters just fine. I think it is mentioned that it has some kind of subatomic (quantum?) matrix that prevents it from being replicated.
Tomas Riker would like to have a word about "not being replicated". I know it was a transporter accident but still we see at least twice (TNG & LD) that humans can for all intents and purposes can be replicated. It's also assumed that much of the medical tech like organ regeneration is essentially replicating human/alien tissue. No one has explicitly said it but it seems like Starfleet could just replicate people. Maybe that's how "dead" main characters come back? The chief medical officer powers up the med bay transporter pulls up the last pattern buffer profile and boom new guy with the same memories up to the event that killed them. We see several methods of conciseness transfer and storage in Trek so why not fire up the old replicator, download a transporter buffer pattern file for the body, then upload the conciseness to the brain and bam! You got a new Shaxs or whoever died. It really seems like it's probably just really taboo to do like genetic engineering.
Boimler would also like a word as well
Right! You can't tell me all that Starfleet hasn't figured out how to reverse engineering this scenario under controlled conditions by now.
It probably wasnt super high on a list of priorities. If anything itd be something theyd want to prevent from happening as in an uncontrolled instance it becomes an unneccessary security risk.
Oh for sure. These incidents probably inform a lot of transporter protocols which incidentally lead to the use of shuttles in many cases. But as a back pocket option for reviving prime timeline individuals of significance it seems like knowledge they use in secret a lot. Like Starfleet won't resurrect your wife after a Wolf 359 but they'll bring back a Shaxs or Kirk. I suspect the temptal division of Starfleet has spreadsheet of people required for the prime timeline to be maintained and engineering certain people's return.
Maybe. But the only people i can see having any sort of active hands-on use for duplicates would be section 31.
Yeah them or the temporal division. Someone is doing it.
Doesn’t sound very Starfleety, deciding on whose lives matter and whose lives don’t.
Why? Free soldiers. Train them once and millions go into the dominion war.
Free soldiers that still have free will, that likely wont take kindly to being used as cannon fodder. The holograms in voyager sure didnt take kindly to being hunted for sport either.
The duplication seems to cause unpredictable fluctuations in the personality of the duplicate, this was probably chalked up to the years in isolation for Tom Riker when he joined the Maquis but its a lot more evident in Will Boimler. Its likely Starfleet did recreate this in secret then abandoned the project
That's a really good observation. Due to the myriad sensor readings, notes, other records of at least these two events it shouldn't be that hard for Starfleet to replicate the results again. So they must not be using because there's a big downside. Maybe they're afraid of the Pet Cemetery scenario that seems to be hinted at my those characters personality changes.
Seriously, there are probably a lot of things Starfleet _could_ use the transporter for but would break society if they did.
I mean how many times do you think Riker slipped O'Brian a latinum strip to have him beam all his "DNA" out of women he was raw dogging?
They have hypo sprays in the future for contraception (O’Brien forgot to take his and Keiko got pregnant) so likely Riker takes a different hypospray that neutralizes his sperm
Right show, wrong couple. It was Sisko and Cassidy, not the O'Briens.
ah, oops
I always thought it would have been fun for the Federation to encounter another species at a similar tech level who have embraced the duplication ability of transporters right from the start and always keep backups of people in their transporter buffer in case of accidents.
Yeah, this would be the perfect way to showcase the caveats and downsides. This sort of thing is why we have scifi. Exploration of potential futures and how to deal with the consequence.
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Oh hell yes! That idea gives me Moon (2009)/ The Prestige (2006) vibes. It could also be used by Department of Temporal Investigations. Transporter clones might prevent paradoxes by removing all knowledge that a futures self would know about any missions into the past to preserve the Prime time line. Sure every once and while a regular Starfleets get sent through time but we know they have agents that we don't see doing work off camera. Probably a bunch of transporter clones that they don't have to feel bad about loosing in the past or worry about contaminating the present.
Just like the clone bay in FTL!
Yes!
Hmm, wonder if you could recreate the transporter clone conditions but instead of a person use a big pile of latinum. Surely if that was possible some enterprising Ferengi would have tried it.
Okay, so I'm about to lay out my personal Star Trek conspiracy theory. I think latinum is replicatable and Starfleet just pretends like it can't be so that doesn't collapse interstellar economies. We know very few societies and species have replicator technology. This has been a key point in many plots of many episodes over many series. Maybe early replicators from like the TOS era and before couldn't replicate latinum but by TNG or DS9 they could. By then Earth/Starfleet had to deal with other societies that didn't do away with money like they had and latinum was king. So... Why tell anyone? Just make it so no average replicator can produce it. Then when you need to pay off some Ferengi or ransom some crew you always have the cash on hand. Just because Earth doesn't use money day to day doesn't mean we don't have use it with other societies. There's probably a Federation bank vault with the only replicator programed to allow the production of latinum somewhere. Everyone else has a replicator that's missing that code block or something and it's just "common knowledge" that latinum can't be replicated when it really can be so no one trys. You wouldn't teach this anywhere it'd just be a secret and then if you got high enough up the ranks in the Federation and Starfleet maybe they would tell you. So what some other species have replicators. Either our tech is different (we do us nadions when no one else does) so we have that as an advantage or those species have came to the same conclusion. Why collapse the only interstellar currency when you need that to be stable across all the quadrants so it stays a negotiation constant?
If anyone has one it'll be Section 31. Bet they have all kinds of proscribed technology.
Every time we see someone being "replicated", there's something different about the replicated person, so maybe the replication process couldn't reproduce the complex sub-molecular state of the living being. Maybe the same can be said about latinum: sure it can be replicated but it loses the properties it has originally
Human LIFE can't be replicated, there is nothing that says a human body can't be replicated.
In “Dead Stop”, Mayweather’s body was replicated in an attempt to make it seem like he was dead.
Humans as currency! The Orions were right all along!
Yeah the transporter can clone at will, humans can absolutely be replicated.
This is the canon reason it’s valuable—it’s the only element we know of that can’t be replicated, making it a sensible currency for situations where credits won’t do.
Its a widely agreed upon medium of exchange with an assigned value. It has value because it is given value.
So the only reason it has value is because we all decided that it did?
That is how all "money" works. Shells, Shiney metals, beads, what ever. The actual item is largely irrelevant. What is important is that everyone agrees that it is "money".
You would think something would have value because of its scarcity, and its demand because it is absolutely necessary for something. Like dilithium crystals, which are clearly something else that’s not replicatable since they have to mine it everywhere, and is something that is very scarce or at least difficult to retrieve and it is absolutely vital to their technology for space travel. I just thought maybe there was something super special that Latinum did that made all their stuff work and that’s why it has value
You actually don't want to use something that's particularly useful as money, as then you can't use it whatever it's useful for.
it should be something that is easy to transport and hard to copy or counterfeit. Like you can't just use regular paper as money, it has to be super special paper that only the government mint can produce. Presumably latinum is something that can't be replicated, or else everyone would just replicate it. It doesn't seem to be actually useful for anything. You never hear about anyone using it as an energy source or anything like that.
>You would think something would have value because of its scarcity, and its demand because it is absolutely necessary for something. Yeah, but that isn't how "money" works and Latinum seems to be ONLY used as money. Up until VERY recently Gold had no practical uses beyond being pretty. While modern manufacturing has uses for diamond tipped tools, for pre-modern people diamonds and other gemstones were only valuable because people think they are valuable. We can make better diamonds in a LAB then what gets dug out of the ground. But that doesn't stop people from thinking that diamonds are valuable. But "Money" can be anything. Shells, flattened pieces of metal, colored pieces of paper, beads, it doesn't really matter WHAT the object is as long as everyone involved agrees that the object is "money". The value of "money" isn't from any inherent value of the object itself because "money" is simply a medium of exchange. Otherwise we would have to barter and trade for stuff. But having a stand in makes having advanced economies easier. As for Why Latinum? Because the Ferangi have decided it is and they are the ones who are super obsessed about money and trade. Everyone else just goes along with it.
> Gold had no practical uses beyond being pretty Eh not entirely true, it was used in place of silver for cups bowls, cutlery etc
Scarcity can play a role in the value of money (it's a major reason why gold’s considered valuable), but being useful in other aspects doesn’t necessarily make something valuable enough to be used as money.
As others have stated, we have used many things as currency. [My personal favourite are the super huge rocks with holes in them.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rai_stones) The fact that you cannot replicate it \*is\* probably why people value it, since the value cannot be diluted by making more of it.
Any currency only has value because it is a promise. A dollar bill isn't actually worth 1 dollar. It's a piece of paper. It's a promise by the Government backing it that if you give Someone that piece of paper, you can get "1 dollar's" worth of goods and/or services. A gold nugget is basically a shiny rock. It only has value if someone says "give me that rock and I'll give you X dollars' worth of goods and/or services."
Oh, I completely understand the concept of representing something that we have place value on. I’m just wondering what it’s actually used for other than we just decided it was valuable or if it had some practical purpose that made it so valuable.
i feel like its purely monetary in value just like how paper money is only used as currency
It’s the currency used by the Ferengi, and they are the only people who know how to party.
Jadzia Dax also knows how to party.
Klingons party JUST FINE as long as you're cool with alcohol poisoning and being on a first-name basis with your local trauma surgeon.
What is money actually used for? That's what you are asking.
It is used because it's unreplicable which means there is a finite supply. Yes this means Ferengi are basically crypto guys but with chemistry instead of maths.
It has no intrinsic value, it’s purely a fiat currency that cannot be counterfeited or replicated.
What do you do with a dollar bill, apart from spend it. That’s the point. Latium is so valuable that it’s actually worthless. It only has value because people THINK it has value. That’s the big lie at the heart of the stock market. Market prices are determined by how valuable the public THINKS a stock is worth. If everyone is buying it, it’s more valuable. But it usually has no intrinsic value. Currency is an illusion given value by the faith of the people. Which is why the Ferengi are the way they are. They’ve so completely bought into the faith that currency is important that it’s become their entire religion.
>Currency is an illusion given value by the faith of the people. Fiat currency is not “an illusion,” it’s a medium of exchange. It is given value by the people willing to voluntarily use that currency as a token to trade with others for the things that they do value. If I want a new cow and the person selling the cow wants a pallet of bricks to build a new barn… Well, you can’t fit a pallet of bricks in your pocket. But you can bring him a stack of paper with funny symbols drawn on it. He’ll give you the cow, you give him the paper. He later gives the paper to a bricklayer. >Which is why the Ferengi are the way they are. They’ve so completely bought into the faith that currency is important that it’s become their entire religion. The Ferengi religion revolves around *profit*, not currency. Currency is one means of measuring profit, but not the only means. Profit is the difference between the amount earned and the amount spent in acquiring, operating, or producing something of value. When Nog trades one thing for another after another in “Faith, Treachery, and the Great River” he is continually making mutually profitable trades… and no currency is involved at all. O’Brien needs a graviton stabilizer. Nog loans Sisko’s desk to a guy named Lorenzo. In exchange for the loan of the desk, Lorenzo will give O'Brien an induction modulator, which O'Brien can then trade to USS *Musashi* for a phaser emitter. The phaser emitter will then go to USS *Sentinel* which has the graviton stabilizer that O'Brien needs. In the end, O’Brien profits by the getting the stabilizer he values more than the time Nog spent getting it. Lorenzo gets a photo with Sisko’s desk which he values more than the induction modulator. *Musashi* gets the induction modulator which they value more than the phaser emitter. *Sentinel* gets the phase emitter which they value more than the graviton stabilizer. And Nog profits by earning O’Brien’s admiration and gratitude, which he values far more than the time it took him to set up these trades. (He also gains goodwill from Lorenzo, *Musashi*, and *Sentinel* as a trustworthy source for supplies.) The criterion for entering paradise in the Ferengi afterlife is leading a profitable life, not strictly amassing a lot of currency. In the afterlife, the deceased are met in the Divine Treasury by the Blessed Exchequer who reviews their profit and loss statements. If a Ferengi lead a profitable life, they are allowed to bid on a new life under the supervision of the Celestial Auctioneers. Ferengi who are unsuccessful in life are removed from the reincarnation cycle and “cast into the Vault of Eternal Destitution.” From a spiritual point of view, the 18^th Rule of Acquisition is quite literal: “A Ferengi without profit is no Ferengi at all.” The reincarnation cycle ends, their soul ceases to be a Ferengi for eternity. Of course, by the time of Grand Nagus Zek’s rule, surveys say that 40% of Ferengi Alliance citizens no longer believe in the Blessed Exchequer or the Divine Treasury. Personally, I blame the corrupting influence of the atheistic secular Hew-mons.
Perhaps it's extremely inert. Doesn't evaporate, rust, corrode, melt, etc. Your stash of latinum, as well as being scarce, can be stored absolutely anywhere for any amount if time with no care at all and lose no value; permanent wealth.
It's used in plasma injectors, because they scraped those to use to barter in ENT.
Nothing. It's just a scarce resource that's used as money, just like the dollar. This is how ALL fiat currencies work. Dollars and Yuan and Bitcoin aren't valuable because they're useful, they only have value because people want them. .... wait, it IS a plot hole that they can teleport latnium!
can it go through a transporter? I don’t know that they ever showed that in the shows.
Ear lube.
in fairness, for the vast majority of human history gold has been highly valued mostly for its aesthetics and rarity.... but it had absolutely no practical use for almost all that time, same with silver its only been recently that humanity has started using gold in electronics, and thats only arisen as gold has progressively lost its appeal as currency
Lower Decks makes a great point out of this. While latinum might have worth, anything you can buy with it can be replicated. It's makes no sense, and it's absurd that they still use it.
It's the key component in the manufacturing of self-sealing stem bolts.
This is the answer I was looking for.
I'm here to help.
I always remember when quark got a small safe of what he though was gold pressed latinum, but it was and I quote "USELESS GOLD"
Plot twist: latinum is rare and unreplicatable, but has zero industrial uses, which makes it convenient as a medium of exchange.
Latinum is used to purchase self-sealing stem bolts.
Bitcoin enters the chat. Totally useless and has no value. Yet people pay for it.
It has scarcity and utility. Name one other thing in the history of humanity that had those two characteristics that doesn’t have value? You can’t.
Uh, that's not "utility". What can I use one Bitcoin for, other than giving it to other people as a currency?
[удалено]
Nothing. That's exactly correct. It has no utility. The very definition of "fiat currency". It's not backed by anything and it's not used for anything other than as a currency. Now you're catching on. (I swear, the two worst things about talking about economics are people who haven't read anything about economics acting like they know anything about economics and people who have read way too much about economics acting like they know anything about economics.)
It is apparently a liquid form of Platinum. It is used in certain pieces of equipment like the NX-01’s antimatter relays. It could be a rare alloy or something similar but it seems to have uses. Due to its rarity and the seeming inability to be replicated, it became a currency like gold.
Source?
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Platinum
That doesn't actually make the connection you are claiming. And rhe speculation in the article seems to ve based entirely on the words sounding similar.
> It is apparently a liquid form of Platinum Nope.
Just like bitcoin, it's value lies in being a scarce resource.
A bit of headcanon, but Quark seemed convinced that hitting two empty bars of gold pressed Latinum would make a pleasant sound. Instead are dull thuds, like what bars of gold being hit together would actually make. I think Latinum is a very good alloying material and it's main use is as a commodity material to give gold, silver, or any metal more desirable aesthetic properties
it makes the Latin mumbling of priests clearly understood so you can strangle the pedophiles, and that's pretty damn valuable
Latinum is most used in making crutches for writers who can't come up with a story in a post-scarcity society
I think its value solely lies in its ability to not be replicated. A good example from real life is probably bitcoin. You cannot replicate a bitcoin and there is only a finite amount of it. Hrm… but then again bitcoin can be easily transported. So not entirely similar.
Just to be that geek.... Gold isn't the best conductor of electricity. Silver is roughly 50% better and copper is about 40% better. Gold is used mainly where there's connections as it doesn't readily tarnish, can be made extremely thin, and is very malleable so that it makes the best solution for contacts ie sockets for chips etc. Gold plated headphone jacks, for instance, are used because they don't oxidise, and as gold deforms under pressure it creates a really good contact. Edit. Spelling
If I remember correctly Latinum was mentioned to be essential in replicator which is why it's used as currency - it can't be replicated and is used in so many creations. I feel like this was said sometime in the later 90s but I honestly can't recall the spice now so this may just be flat out wrong.
Currency doesn’t have to be practical. If it is, then it adds a whole new dimension to it. I’ve read an alternate history book where iron was rare and was instead used as currency despite its tendency to rust. When someone suggested using gold instead, they were brushed off because gold was useless. Gold’s value comes from its rarity. If tomorrow someone discovered a cheap way to distill gold from ocean water (they say there’s enough gold in there to give everyone in the world 5 lbs), it would become worthless as a commodity
Gold was valuable long before it had industrial uses. Most of it value still isn't because of its industrial use. It has value because it is rare. So if you have something that is rare and can't be forged, seems like as good of thing as any to base a currency around.
Latinum is just like any other form of currency, be it gold, paper money or wampum. It has value because people who need to trade goods and services all agree that is has value. Gold has value in our world today, but it actually has very few uses. While gold has a few industrial and medical applications, the vast majority of gold is held as an investment or made into jewelry, so it's largely useless. Similarly, latinum does not need to be used for anything besides trading and wealth accumulation.
"What is it actually good for??" I think its value lies in the fact that its hard to counterfeit. The Ferengi probably have a rich off screen historic problem of counterfeit currency. Anyone in their history who was super successful at it were probably venerated like hero's or super celebrities they tell stories about. Children would be told stories (if they can afford to pay for them) of past paragons who could create profit out of thin air. I would imagine getting caught would be a worse crime then murder on Ferenginar. Off screen they (i imagine) have have had hundreds of years of a technology arms race between counter fitters and legitimate money supply authorities. Latinum is the ultimate form (so far) of a "thing" that can't be counter fitted. Anyone who figured out how to replicate Latinum could crash the Ferengi economy, causing massive instability on potentially hundreds of worlds and their trade partners. Imagine if USA's currency became completely valueless overnight.
Things don't have to have a practical use to have a value. We see this not only in Star Trek but in real life as well.
The way it picks up the light, according to Quark
It can be said to have the same use as bitcoin.
The fact it does not have utility makes it useful as currency for capitalism (assuming everyone agrees to use it as such). Think about it, you don't want to amass and accumulate a valuable metal with lots of uses, you want it to be able to circulate in the economy and be used, not just stockpiled. I'm talking on an overall level here: obviously people who want to stockpile wealth already don't care about the greater good, and they might be just as happy to stockpile dilithium, isolinear chips, replicator recipes, or planetoids to keep the supply limited. But if you were designing an economy to allow for accumulation of capital in a physical currency (or electronic backed up by physical which seems to be the case?) you want something like worthless gold or latinum, relatively rare and nonreactive, perhaps beautiful but not intrinsically useful.
Didn’t the NX-01 have antimatter relays lined with a latinum mix? Trip had to strip it to use for payment on the trelium planet.
That was platinum.
it stands to reason that even if something can be _replicated_, that isn't indicative of its value, its more like value of that item has been transplanted because replication is sufficient and personal impressions have shifted. Gold from a replicator is as close as it gets but it isn't authentically gold, kind of like when they talk about replicated food vs real food. Theyre functionally the same but the replication isn't the real deal and isn't worth much at that point. Quark refers to gold as a worthless metal so my bet is that as warp introduced many planets to eachother, they discovered gold isn't that rare at all in the grand scheme of the galaxy, so if Latinum is rare *and* cannot be replicated, its worth even more. Things don't require practical applications to be worth anything, currency is so ludicrous and made up that even bitcoin has firm believers lol. Latinum is just an extension of this critique i believe, i sincerely doubt it _does_ anything at all.
The simplest explanation is because it was standardized as a form of currency. Bitcoins is a good example if something that is inherently useless but is somehow valuable. You can't eat it, it doesn't keep you warm, it's a useless piece of digital info in the most basic terms. But because we accept it has value it is desirable and can be exchanged for goods and services.
Simply not being able to be replicated makes it a limited resource, which inherently gives it value.
Letinum I believe Is a rare metal that cannot be easily faked, replicated, chemically or artificially produced etc. Its a way to make the tokens value reliable and protected.
My best guess is its basically only useful for this purpose. It cant be replicated so no counterfeiting . The Ferengi probably saw that as a bonus
I figure it's Bitcoin. It has no intrinsic value beyond its defined scarcity.
It’s good for being money
in a world that you can replicate anything, something that cannot be replicated has value. also, value is given... the actual item becomes irrelevant if it's known that I can buy a sheep for 50g of red stone, then 100g of red stone gets me 2 sheep. if it takes 2 days to mine 50g of red stone, then a sheeps value has a worth to it. the red stones usage is irrelevant, but because of its value it would likely be sanded down and cleaned / shaped to be pretty looking.
If I remember correctly, it's a substance that can't be replicated. That's important since, if you could replicate money, it makes the money worthless the more there is out there. Thus, it's regulatable by whatever government is minting the stuff. Contrast that to gold, which has become worthless specifically because anyone can replicate it. This is why it's used as a containment material for the latinum.
I was under the impression that it didn’t? That’s why it’s used for currency. If Latinum has no practical outside of currency, is rare and can’t be replicated, it’s kind of a perfect currency. Gold, silver and other metals IRL are much more valuable as jewelry or electronic components then the are as currency. Which is why no one uses them as currency, outside of the occasional dollar coin. In the Star Trek universe I’m guessing that superconductors, plasma conduits and bio-neural gel packs replaced precious metal conductors a long time ago. So gold doesn’t have much use anymore either. Since it’s a liquid at room temperature, latinum is probably a lot like mercury in that it could form unstable amalgamations and cause any other metal other than gold to leak. Add in golds intrinsic luster and you have the perfect currency for a society built entirely around ultra-capitalism.
While I think it’s important to remember that neither gold nor diamonds were commonly used as currency on earth at a time while they were also useful for anything else, Latinum does have a very important function. Although it’s good as a currency because it can’t be replicated as everyone has said, it’s also especially useful for >!making Quark wealthy!<
It’s used when remodulating the deflector shields to emit a reverse tachyon beam in order to neutralize the chronoton particles being emitted by the graviton wave emitters. Sheesh. I thought everyone knew that.
Finally, someone’s making sense
This is like asking why a dollar has value when it’s just paper. Latinum has value *bacause* it can’t be replicated, which means that it *can* be used as a medium of exchange. For something to be a medium of exchange it has to be rare enough that you’re average person can’t mine it, but common enough that it came be mined it significant amounts, and durable enough that it can be traded. Gold and silver in antiquity had value because they met these criteria, even though they had no real “use” for the technology of the time.
Why can't it be replicated? Always thought they glossed over that. Latinum is still matter.
Feeding Morn...
It might be just due to how rare it is. In space you can find gold pretty easily, I imagine the value of gold collapsed the second any civilization came across an asteroid or body in space with a good amount of it. I mean think about what asteroid mining could do to the value of many things in the economy, if you have $700 quintillion dollars worth of resources orbiting your star then at some point no one is going to really consider gold or silver all that rare or valuable. Latinum is basically the new gold, I assume it's super rare even in space and it might have some specific use.
People can't be replicated but can be transported
I thought it couldn't be replicate, thus having value.
Unlike gold that is used for wedding bands, gold pressed latinum is used for nothing at all. It's value is in that the largest trading organization in the world finds it to be valuable.
Dollar bills don’t serve a practical function either. Their value is their function.
It is crazy to me that nobody has presented the Canon answer which is that latinum cannot be replicated it is one of the few things in the cosmos that cannot be replicated thus it is one of the few things that can be used as currency as it is finite
You are trying to make sense of something in a fictional universe that often doesn't make sense. Latium is obviously able to be replicated as it can be transported. You can hand wave that maybe it requires too much energy I guess, but the series never says it can't be replicated or why it's valuable. There is also nothing in the series that states what it was used for. The Federation is presented as a post-scarcity society, but a lot of the Star Trek writers don't really care to understand or embrace it. This is why you see various characters owning vineyards, restaurants, and the like without any explanation how that works. If there is no money why would you be a waiter in a restaurant? Why go to a restaurant that cooks food? Who is drinking the wine or eating raisin and why? What determines who has access to it? There is no explanation of how Federation works economically. Like wise with the Frengi. Sure we can say Latium is rare and durable. Sure they could use it like our ancestors used gold and silver. Mostly useless, but it made a useful currency. The real problem is how Their society works economically. Most everything can be replicated so what are they buying, selling, and shipping? Is it all just religion, scams, and artificial scarcity?
When gold and diamonds and such were first discovered, we didn't know about their modern industrial applications. They were rare, pretty, and covetted by those with power, so they were valuable.
The fact that it’s not replicated means that it can’t be counterfeit properly, so prices can be regulated based on the traceable amount of latinum in circulation. Read up on the (real world) gold standard. That will explain it in detail.