Something that has often bugged me. In TNG, none of the crew were ever seen parting with gold pressed latinum of any other currency and nobody discussed receiving money for their services. However, in DS9, the crew are seen regularly using the 24th century equivalent of a card machine in Quark’s (thumbprint) and gold-pressed latinum is mentioned all the time. Because it was a space station, did the crew get expenses so they could buy stuff from the restaurants and Quark’s or was it ever mentioned how much a Lieutenant was paid as a salary, I presume they were?
DS9 or TNG lacked references to Starfleet employees getting paid, and we learned Jake Sisko had no access to money, not even when he "sold" a book. But the Starfleet heroes probably did have an expenses account, as there was offhand mention of a bar tab every now and then. In jest or in earnest? Well, Quark doesn't joke about money... TNG also made reference to an apparent expenses account in "Encounter at Farpoint" already; Crusher had credits to spend, despite never suggesting she was earning those. Sounds like a smooth setup to me: Starfleet has baubles for keeping the natives happy, and various means of making the baubles attractive. Replicator-less societies will happily accept replicated riches, but the Ferengi could be part of a more complex UFP/foreigner economy arrangement that the actual users of the baubles need not worry about. Timo Saloniemi
That makes perfect sense how they do things in the 24th Century with the replicator playing a part in trade and an arrangement with the Ferengi.
Starfleet Accounting almost made it to air in an episode and canon: https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Starfleet_Accounting
Yeah I think this makes sense, or Federation credits can be swapped for Latinum at the Promenade bureau de change. Come to think of it, whilst Latinum might be rare and valuable to Ferengi and therefore a defacto currency, it doesn't mean it's rare in the Federation. There might be Latinum moons around Benzar VIII or something.
In a replica society such as Federation planets, I take it that most people did not work. There would be no need. The only people who worked were people who wanted to accomplish things for the sake of accomplishment and not payment.
We don't know whether latinum as a substance is particularly valuable. The things we do know: - gold-pressed latinum (GPL) is good as a medium of exchange even though gold is explicitly worthless - latinum is good for pretty brooches - latinum is a liquid in room temperature and pressure - latinum liquid extracted from GPL can be worth a fortune We might deduce that latinum is in fact a valuable substance, and then further decide that this is because it is rare, this further meaning it cannot be affordably replicated. Or then we might deduce that latinum and gold put together make for practical cash, just like ink and cotton paper make for practical cash even though both ink and cotton paper are worthless. Legal tender today has value because the value is coded into the physical cash; in GPL, the coding would be in the latinum part since the gold is explicitly worthless alone even in those cases where it used to be one half of GPL. So the latinum liquid may be trivially replicable, but the chemical coding within is not, much like the printing of money is trivial but the printing of money with value is not. Chemical coding would allow for varying levels and means of identification. Quark likes to bite his lower-denomination money for verification, suggesting taste might be one aspect of the coding; if the forger bothered to use real-tasting latinum, then the slip is good enough and can at least be passed on by Quark to the next victim. The larger bricks would just warrant closer scrutiny with an appropriate scanner - but the coding possibilities would be endless in such a massive object full of the coding medium. Timo Saloniemi
Somewhere I read about an idea that gold-pressed latinum was not actually liquid latinum sealed inside a hollow gold shell, but that the two were chemically mixed or something. Of course, when Quark gets a hold of all those empty bricks that have been drained of their latinum, physically they are hollow shells. But the material breaks and crumbles in a way that solid gold wouldn't. Kor