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Originally Posted by DigTw0Grav3s
Perhaps tangential, but would fiat currency - particularly in a digital format - have any value after the exchange? The nuclear obliteration of most global industry would ensure that straight barter and enforceable I.O.U.s would be the only viable enconomics left, no?
If I'm trying to reload my own brass and hope that the harvest turns out this year, a bunch of binary values in some NYC vault don't have much value to me, do they?
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Not for you (or me) but for governments and large businesses (and you better believe they'd want to get back in the business of industry and governance again PDQ...again, there'd be massive devaluation and currency would likely still have to trade on physical assets ("How much gold is in Fort Knox, did you say?"), but I would tend to think there'd be some EFT going on as quickly as reset got going again in a serious way.
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Also, wouldn't most of the actual hard communications infrastructure be toast with or without the computers that run them? Satellite dishes would be toast, EMP effects would have used the power grid as a massive tuning fork, and the like.
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It depends; again, the communication backbones (the military/government ones) the post-disaster internet were to rely on are fairly robust.
Of course if you're in a Grimdark mood you can take the "EMP was far worse than anyone imagined" line from one of the sourcebooks and say "Well, no it's not working at all any more" and then it's gone.
Lest anyone think I'm promoting a "USA Triumphs over all" theme, I'm talking about events happening over a decade or two; Reset is the linchpin here.