Woolong

In the science fiction anime television series Cowboy Bebop, the woolong is the universal currency used by humans in the Solar system. It is usually transacted directly from one account to another using portable electronic devices which can network to ATMs and each other, and only rarely carried as actual paper currency. While never explicitly said, one woolong is assumed to be equivalent to one modern Japanese yen (0.008612 United States dollars). This is consistent with the bounties of various bounty heads, where a 500,000 is considered "small" ($4300 or 3000 Euros) and a "huge" bounty is 300,000,000 woolongs ($25 million or 18 million Euros), while a single watermelon in a situation of scarcity is 1000 woolongs ($8 or 6 Euros).

The symbol for woolong is ₩, which is similar to the currency symbol for the Korean won (Unicode 20A9 hexadecimal, 8361 decimal).

Note that "woolong" is also a way to spell oolong, as in the tea, although it is doubtful that this means anything in regard to the fictional currency.

Although one woolong is probably the smallest unit of currency in the Bebop universe, there is one instance in which a bounty amount was actually posted with a string of zeroes to 9 decimal places; however, it turns out that this was due to the eccentricity of the poster, who switched the comma used for the thousands separator with the period used for the decimal separator, resulting in Jet and Spike chasing a 50 woolong bounty when they expected fifty million.