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Originally Posted by Steven Lake
It's unlikely that you'd see any kind of paper fiat currency or payment method in the first 100 years, or even the first 200, as it takes a strong central government to make that viable.
Even so paper currency only came into mainstream use in the mid 1600's. Before that the most you had was a note of credit that went between two banks, or outposts, or wherever.
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I think you'd get paper currency earlier than that, because there's now a long-established history of it. (Also: pre-1600's, no printing press. Printing presses made paper currency cheap enough to be widely used. Post-apoc, printing presses would be rare--but it only takes one to make the practice viable in a large region.) Banks & other wealth repositories would issue banknotes on any medium that's hard to duplicate... and in a post-apoc world, counterfeiting would be a lot harder.
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So during the initial survival and recovery period, you'd be doing a lot of barter and trading just like they did back in colonial days. Believe it or not, except in the big cities of America, most commerce centered around barter.
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I think you'd see a lot more communities that almost eliminated currency/exchange systems, as people just work together to survive. A lot of low-tech socialism/communism around the necessities, because when resources are scarce enough, there's no room for bargaining about value. But people would barter & bargain for luxuries.
I suspect in the immediate decade or two after the apocalypse, you'd see a lot of communities *trying* to use bottle caps for money, or old coins, or something else, because the survivors are used to money, and they'll want to think that if they can reestablish currency, they've got one of the essential parts of civilization covered.