Why are Bottle Caps the Currency of Fallout?

If you play a melee only character you use ammo as currency.

An elderly man I work with told me about when he was a child they would trade bottle caps in at the store for a chocolate bar. Since then it’s been my head cannon that the children that survived in Fallout grew up and had this memory of using bottle caps as currency

There’s a sidequest in Fallout 2 where you recover someone’s stash of treasure, only to find, it’s all bottlecaps, which are worthless in the NCR.

In an alternate reality where bullets are the currency: "It costs me $400,000 dollars to fire this gun for 12 seconds."

I think it would be interesting if bottle caps from different beverages acted as different denominations of money with more common beverage, bottle caps like nuka cola being worth less than rarer caps like vim

What's weird to me, well one of many things lol, is finding caps in safes that appear (due to situation they're encountered in) to be pre-war, untouched by subsequent events. Why would anyone put bottlecaps in a safe pre-war? Maybe they saw this video? And don't get me started on bullets and weapons in trashcans...

I think a modern version of this could be soda tabs. Even lighter than caps, with holes for carrying them, and a very complex design to “forge” in a wasteland.

as kids, we used to play this hopscotch game where you needed a "token" to throw to move. we used to all just get rocks. then one day, one of the kids found a bottle cap and stuck mud in the hollow side and used that instead. we all thought it was so COOL. we all went scavenging to find the coolest bottle caps to make our own bottle cap tokens and show off how much cooler our cap was. the coolest caps were beer caps and the more exotic it was, the cooler you were. Coors and Budweiser were everywhere, but anything else and you'd be the envy of the group and could exchange it for stuff from other kids.

In 76 the concept was a nukacola promotion for bottle caps that never ended. Allowing nukacola bottlecaps to directly exchange for goods like food

Surprised that Iguana-bits weren't used as currency

In ancient Sparta currency was in the form of iron rods. It had a two-fold benefit: (1) They were hard to steal in large amounts, so theft of money was a waste of time, and (2) when Sparta went to war weapons became more expensive so it encouraged Spartans to melt down their currency and turn them into weapons.

3:55 interesting that the Metro series was able to implement this idea pretty well, imo. Dirty rounds vs Pristine military grade ammunition. Use the cheap dirty rounds for combat or use your very valuable military grade ammunition, that doubles as currency, to do much MUCH more damage than the cheap rounds.

It was meant as a joke take on how our current currency is actually worthless. A bottlecap also has no actual value at all.

Seems to be a common theme when it comes to post-apocalyptic scenarios. Money becomes so worthless, it's not even good enough to wipe your arse with.

Technically if you secure a Nuka Cola bottling factory you’re set for life in the post apocalypse Fallout universe.

Kinda odd how, despite it being one of the factors that lead to bottlebaps being chosen, we never see strings of bottlecaps in game. At least as far as I remember, they always are depicted as singles or unseen within a boxes inventory.

imagine if season 2 opens with a flashback of nuka cola becoming a huge corp then it shows the factory which they are being bottled in and a bottle cap falls on the ground and while a employee is picking it up it transitions into the ghoul or lucy in the present time picking up a bottle cap they found on the ground

i like to think that, because of the influence of fallout and it being a widely known and popular game, that if something like that happen in the real world some people may accept caps in trades and for currency lol

Its nice to have different currencies in games rather than the standard "Credits or dollars" most tend to use. I once played an MMO where the currency was poker chips. (Fallen Earth) it was a unique take on what people would be able to get their hands on because there was no central banking system anymore.

Ive always likened it to the hackmetals that were used as money in many old cultures. The weight and type of metal is what's carrying the value.