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In Guardians of the Galaxy, they make many references to "units", which is their currency. For example, Quill's bounty was 30,000 units and the fee to recover the orb was worth 4,000,000 units. But how much is one unit worth? How many units for say, a cheeseburger?

How many units is equal to one U.S. Dollar?

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    I usually assume in movies such as this that one "unit" = one dollar. most of the time they don't want to use Earth currency, but they also don't want to make the watchers have to think hard. So they make it vague and for a majority of the audience they'll convert into whatever works for them.
    – DForck42
    Jan 25, 2015 at 7:19
  • Global currency or i will say Universal Currency.
    – Ankit Sharma ♦
    Feb 10, 2015 at 10:15
  • Given that a) bounties for people or goods aren't easily pegged against commodity goods and b) we have no idea if beef or cheese are commodities in that neck of the universe, I'd say it's impossible of us to say with that limited information.
    – DA.
    Sep 15, 2015 at 21:25

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Since we see no Earth-based transactions being conducted using the "unit" currency, it's impossible to know. And it could very well be what the writers are aiming at. Science fiction writers have long used generic currencies like "credits" without any links to real world economy so that they don't have the extra effort of figuring out realistic values.

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In Guardians of the Galaxy 2, Yondu's crew said that a pair of boots cannot be bought with 25 units. With that said upon pure guesstimation, we can guess purely on a hypothesis that a pair of boots and be bought with 50 units (This is made on the guess that they could be bought with that much as we truly do not know the actual value of the unit). That means that one unit would be equal to 0.82 USD = 1 Unit. That is based on the fact that the average cost of boots on earth costs $61.15 (Outside of the MCU). This is an answer based on mild research and the pure guess that a pair of boots can be bought with 50 units. So, Quill's bounty should roughly be about 24,600 USD, the Orb should be about 3,280,000 USD and a cheeseburger can be bought with about 3.68 units. This is about 18 cents short of @DForck42 guess of a unit being a 1:1 ratio with the USD. TO REITERATE!!! This is a guess and we cannot truly know what the true value is for the unit until earth uses the unit in the MCU. Or until the unit can be compared to a real earth currency that we use today.

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    Welcome to Movies.SE! I'm afraid answers based purely on guesswork tend to not be received very well here. It's preferred that answers are backed up by canon evidence, and while you started off with a canon quote, from there you (by your own admission) jumped straight to sheer guesstimation.
    – F1Krazy
    May 17, 2018 at 9:36

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