History Main / WeirdCurrency

* The ancient Aztecs used cocoa beans and lengths of woven cloth, alongside more familiar (to modern readers) hammered copper pieces. People even made counterfeit cocoa beans out of clay. Incidentally, chocolate drinks (made out of cocoa, cornmeal, chili pepper, and cold water[[note]]the Aztecs had no milk and no sweeteners besides fruit juice and a sort of thin honey, so they drank their chocolate as a bitter/savory stimulating drink in the vein of the Old World's unsweetened tea or coffee, but cold[[/note]] started as their variant on MoneyToBurn.

* ''Super Snail'' has tadpoles as it's currency with white tadpoles being the premium currency. Tadpoles are used because they store large amounts of DNA which is valuable in a world that has significant biotechnology.

** The various preservation NPCs in the open-world hubs take tags from rescuing animals as a currency to trade for items.

* ''TabletopGame/DungeonsAndDragons'': Early editions have it so that Larvae (NeutralEvil souls) are used as currency by the denizens of the lower planes, especially the Night Hags.

* In any scenario where an economy gets destabilised by hyperinflation, currency tends to get weird in denomination, even if its form doesn't change. Perhaps the most famous example of the last 20 years is Zimbabwe's disastrous hyperinflation crisis perpetuated by land reforms; for a short time in 2008, banknotes were being printed with a monumental ''[[https://www.theguardian.com/money/2016/may/14/zimbabwe-trillion-dollar-note-hyerinflation-investment one hundred trillion dollars]]'' (100,000,000,000,000) as the denomination (worth about $30 at the time in 2009, or $36 in 2020); by the time the notes were demonetised, calling them worthless was an understatement. By year three of the crisis in 2009, the original Zimbabwean dollar was worth a 10 ''septillionth'' of its original value. In other words, you would need 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Zimbabwean dollars from 2006 to equal ''one'' Zimbabwean dollar from 2009. This has had the side effect of these notes now being worth many trillions of times ''more'' as collector's items, now that they're no longer legal tender, and some people in Zimbabwe have managed to find a way to make quite a bit of cash in less inflated currencies selling the seemingly-worthless notes to foreign collectors!

* ''VideoGame/FuryUnleashed'' by Awesome Games Studio uses Golden Ink (normal Ink is ExperiencePoints and used to [[SkillScoresAndPerks buy upgrades]] to Fury) as the currency for Fury to buy items from the Ink Master and Gun Seller. Justified as this game is set in a '90s type of comic book come to life.

** ''ARG/WelcomeHomeClownIllustrations'': From what we've seen so far, the neighborhood doesn't use money. Instead, resident shopkeeper Howdy sells goods in exchange for "funny jokes, silly observations, one-dollar ideas, and unique gadgets".

* ''Fury Unleashed'' by Awesome Games Studio uses Golden Ink (normal Ink is ExperiencePoints and used to [[SkillScoresAndPerks buy upgrades]] to Fury) as the currency for Fury to buy items from the Ink Master and Gun Seller. Justified as this game is set in a '90s type of comic book come to life.

* [[http://mimir.net/barmy/coins.html Mimir.net]], a fan site for ''TabletopGame/{{Planescape}}'', includes some weird Outer Plains currencies, including Lodestone Bits (magnetic iron coins worth 10gp) Pine Coins (actual silvery pine cones, entirely worthless outside the Elven Realms of Arvandor) and Soul Prisms (a Lower Plains coin with an evil soul trapped inside, value dependent on the power of the soul), as an expansion of the canonical use of NeutralEvil souls as currency on the Lower Planes.

* ''VideoGame/Destiny'' and its [[VideoGame/Destiny2 its sequel]] have Glimmer as the main currency of the Last City, which is a form of programmable matter.

* ''VideoGame/DevilMayCry'' uses crystallized demon blood.

This is not a barter system. In a barter system people trade for items directly: a goat for a cow, for example. In a monetary system, money is used as the intermediary: you sell your goat for 5 gold nuggets, and then use 4 of those nuggets to buy a cow. [[SugarWiki/TVTropesWillEnhanceYourLife As a corollary]], the above example is one of several reasons why monetary systems exist: trading a goat for a cow means that you're losing out on one "nugget" of value[[note]] Presuming, of course, you don't consider goats and cows to be of equal value. But then you're likely to make a trade of 1 cow = 1 goat + 1 chicken, or something... .[[/note]], whereas with money, you sell the goat, get the money, and use only the money you need to buy the cow. Therefore a barter system is "inexact", and a monetary system is "exact".

* In the ''[[{{Anime/Akira}} AKIRA]]'' manga, Yen is seldom used in the chaos following [[spoiler: the resurrected Akira's psychic meltdown.]] Instead, survivors prefer to use things like pills or solar cells.

* ''VideoGame/WorldOfHorror'' has a History Club, where you can purchase random occult items, spells or perks, for an increase in Doom. [[spoiler: If you make four purchases, you get knocked out and used as a HumanSacrifice]].

* In ''Webcomic/{{Xkcd}}'' strip #512 "[[http://xkcd.com/512/ Alternate Currency]]", a news report announces the collapse of the dollar, and thus the new currency "is now determined by the number of funny pictures saved to your hard drive."

* The [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rai_stones Rai stones]] from Yap in Micronesia are more in the line of Weird Accounting. Individual carved stones may be over two meters across and were backed, in essence, by whoever was able to muster the manpower to make one in the first place. Ownership of the stones was carefully tracked, making them a banking system operating on cultural memory. One of the stones is currently at the bottom of the ocean, but it's still legal tender. The value of a Rai stone is based not just on its size and craftsmanship, but also on its history. For example if a particularly dangerous journey was involved in quarrying a stone and bringing it back to Yap[[note]]Most Rai stones were quarried nearly 300 miles away on Palau, while some came from even more distant islands.[[/note]], that enhances its value.

* Similarly up north in New France, [[https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/playing-card-money playing cards were used as currency]].

* Guerima, a remote village in Colombia, [[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/southamerica/colombia/2135436/Town-where-cocaine-is-the-only-currency.html uses cocaine (well, coca) as currency]].

** [[https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2011/jul/15/the-incredible-honey-bun-behind-bars/ This article]] discusses the unusual presence of the [[https://littledebbie.com/www/snackproducts/view/49/honey-buns Honey Bun snack cake]] as prison currency. Because of a combination of ubiquity, uniform price ($1.08 at most comissaries), a reasonable yet limited shelf life, and the fact that you will eventually eat these things, the honey bun is a standard in transactions for bartering, gambling, and even paying off hits on other inmates.

* ''TabletopGame/BattleTech'': Because of mass social upheavals, constant war, and the breakdown of communications via Comstar rendering the otherwise omnipresent C-Bill into little more than scrip, the post-Jihad universe has some groups trading in stacks of missiles and crates of autocannon rounds instead. Because ammunition is constantly manufactured yet constantly expended, many savvy traders have realized that it holds value quite well, leading to a rather literal ammo economy.

* ''VideoGame/ShadowHearts: From the New World'' features the Cat Coins used by cats. As an aspiring starlet, [[MegaNeko Mao]]'s personal sidequest is her filming a movie that stars her as a martial artist going through a "five-story pagoda" to rescue her loved one and this currency is needed to pay the cat actors featured on the movie (it's mentioned that human money is not good for them). The only way to acquire the coins is finishing an enemy off with Mao's "Cat Touch" skill, with weaker monsters dropping lower value coins, while harder, late-game enemies drop higher value ones.

* ''Literature/TheWitchOfKnightcharm'': Students at the evil WizardSchool Myth/TheScholomance are given passes based on their performance in classes and in duels. The passes authorize the students to obtain various supplies and are functionally the only currency (actual money being useless because the students can't leave and the Scholomance is the only vendor around).

* The ancient Aztecs used cocoa beans and lengths of woven cloth, alongside more familiar (to modern readers) hammered copper pieces. People even made counterfeit cocoa beans out of clay. Incidentally, chocolate drinks (made out of cocoa, cornmeal, chili pepper, and cold water; the Aztecs had no milk and no sweeteners besides fruit juice and a sort of thin honey, so they drank their chocolate as a bitter/savory stimulating drink in the vein of the Old World's unsweetened tea or coffee, but cold) started as their variant on MoneyToBurn.

* ''TabletopGame/{{Paleomythic}}'' is set [[OneMillionBC so far back in time]] that obsidian weapons are a major breakthrough, so no gold coins or paper dollars. The only currency is gems. The people of Ancient Mu don't make a distinction between precious and semi-precious gemstones, so every shiny rock is valued the same.

* ''LightNovel/CookingWithWildGame'': The tribe of Forest's Edge, which subsists almost wholly on hunting kiba, uses kiba tusks and horns, which they carry on necklaces. (Non-hunters are given these necklaces as compensation for work like weaving, foraging, or cooking celebratory banquets.) Since only the nearby town will treat these necklaces as currency, Asuta speculates it's a deliberate ploy to keep the tribe subservient.