Chipcard

A Chipcard is a card or other small object that can be encoded with a preset amount of recorded financial funds and turned into normal credit at another institution or affiliate related to the original issuing institution.

Description

Bank Chipcards

Within the borders of the Imperium, and on most other worlds of at least tech level 10, some financial institutions issue cards that can be turned into normal credit at any branch of that bank. These are usually issued in denominations of Cr100 and Cr1000 and are expressly for people who do not like what they see as the pervasive invasion of privacy that modern technology has brought. Needless to say, the Imperium watches these banks very closely on its worlds. But it has not gone so far as to make private financial transactions illegal. A chipcard can be verified at any institution that sells things. The card is queried as to its unique passcode, which is sent to the host institution to run through a sophisticated mathematical algorithm to confirm its identity. Then a validity message and denomination is returned to the business performing the query. Businesses that cater to persons desiring anonymity will often accept a wide variety of chipcards, provided the user is willing to accept chipcards in return, as change for the transaction.

Corporate Chipcards

For anonymous transactions, "cash" is available in a variety of electronic forms. A given business or corporation might have chipcards preprogrammed in a variety of denominations, like gift certificates. These are usable only at that business, but the identity of the user does not have to be accessed (although it usually still is, for marketing information, if the comm is set to give it).

The Imperial Solar

The Imperial Solar is a type of chipcard that was issued in the early days of the Third Imperium for the purposes of interstellar trade.

• Please see article at Imperial Solar.

References

This list of sources was used by the Traveller Wiki Editorial Team and individual contributors to compose this article. Copyrighted material is used under license from Mongoose Publishing or by permission of the author. The page history lists all of the contributions.

• Marc Miller. Marc Miller's Traveller (Imperium Games, 1996), 63.
• Greg Porter. Central Supply Catalog (Imperium Games, 1996), 41.