Editing Stars Without Number: Back in Black (section)

=== Money ===
Electronic banking is common within the more civilized systems.  However, there is no easy way to transmit financial information between systems.  It must be carried by ships using spike drives.  Because the mail-ships might take weeks to reach from one end of the State to the other, this isn't practical for anything less than major operations.  As a result, physical credit chips are the most common currency.  They are released by the central bank in the Nyx cluster, and are in common circulation everywhere that spacers go. They may or may not be accepted on the surface of any given world, and moneychangers at the space ports or stations may charge rates that are more or less ruinous.  They come in many denominations, and so a character can potentially carry a LOT of credits.  Of course, flashing around a handful of the 100,000 credit chips is a good way to get marked for robbery.
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You might think of a credit as being worth five or ten modern US dollars.  Yes, skilled spacers are VERY highly paid.  A ship can be easily worth millions of credits, and it takes one bad jump for an unskilled Navigator to blow the whole thing up.  Also, a spacer is typically not working every day.  They work a week while the ship jumps from one system to the next, and then they're off for a week while it loads, unloads, etc.