Credits. Are they just Pilot Fed internal currency?

[Shiro Akai]

Random thought that came to me while I was doing another polymer run. Since it's dull and boring my mind was drifting toward how much credits i have, how much I'll earn, how much will have and what I could buy for it. And so my brain made a connection between ship value and commodity value I'm moving between stations.

And it hit me - Credits are just internal Pilot's Federation exchange medium to make trade settlements. Like "transfer rubles". It's an artificial currency without any real value OUTSIDE the system.

Reasoning.
It started with simple question - how much is 1 Credit worth. What you can buy for it. The simplest answer is - how much is bread worth. 1Cr? 5 Cr? 0.2 Cr? We earn thousands or millions of credits, we spend it on ships, modules, fines, repairs and fuel. We can buy and sell commodities but I don't believe Credits are used to purchase a meal at teh restaurant or a household on station/planet.

Long story short - I think that Credits we use are just a commonground between different stations, power plays and what not to make trade fluid. No weird currency exchange, no speculation. Credit is credit, you can acquire it, you can measure your "wealth" with it, you can spend it on various goods. But all within Pilot Federation system. Outside of it it's useless.

Interesting, huh?
Or is it me going mad after all those polymer runs?

 

[Vardaugas]

I think Credits are intergalactic virtual currency. Then every superpower has its general currency and every minor faction, system, planet and station has their own local currencies. Trading up to a more widely spread currency from what you were locally given always comes at a loss. So people living in a station, working for station currency can't really go anywhere else because the money they have isn't accepted anywhere else.

Could even be that Credits are only allowed to be traded within the credit market and not converted into other currencies legally to keep Commanders dependent and bound to their credit wallets and the system they are supposed to function in. Only way a commander could pay in non-credits would be by buying commodities and trading those in, probably with a highly deflated value, depending who they're dealing with. But remember: Credit fraud may lead to the loss of your Pilot's License.

 

[Stealthie]

Two things immediately occur to me.

Firstly, just cos a "credit" is a unit of currency, it doesn't necessarily mean that unit is representative of what you can buy with it.
By way of analogy, if you have 1 bitcoin, and you buy yourself a Happy Meal with it, you're going to end up with a confusing amount of change.

Secondly, I guess we need to consider supply & demand.
We don't know a vast amount about the economy of the ED universe.
There are certainly some apparently wacky contradictions within it (Buy a Sidey for Cr32,000 and then get paid Cr150,000 to transport some cargo in it) but we don't know the relative value of things in the ED universe.
Maybe "things" are easy to obtain and, thus, low value and far more importance is placed of acquiring services, especially of competent people?