Money is a way to prioritize work according to what is most needed and wanted, without having to centralize communications.

Also it makes bartering asynchronous. I can effectively barter peaches for coffee without needing to find someone who needs my peaches and has excess coffee.

It exponentially reduces the improbability of finding working trades. In that way it’s kind of like a catalyst, reducing the activation energy. It’s like a superconductor for economic signals. Or a reaction surface that helps molecules find each other and react.

Money makes sense if you look at the history of it. People used to barter, but what if you didn't have what the other person needed? Valuable items were used as an intermediary when trading, like jewellery made of precious metal or just coins of precious metals.

Having a lot of money sitting around isn't safe so it went into a bank vault. The banks gave out slips to show how much money you had and people would trade these paper slips instead of the metal coins.

Eventually though the fractional banking system allowed money to be created from nothing, which meant the paper slips no longer represented precious metal in a vault. So now money doesn't represent anything besides a promise. Personally, I don't know if going back to trading bits of gold and silver really changes anything than trading bits of 0s and 1s.

It's just an iou

Money is nothing but trust. When that trust is gone, money has no value. Take a look at Zimbabwe.

Money is time. You use your own time to earn money so that you can buy time from others for their goods and services.

I mean you could say the same about anything really. Govt is just a collective agreed upon system. Individual countries are just arbitrary lines drawn that only persist because we gave those lines meaning.

Everything about civilization only has importance because we give it all importance.

It starts making sense once you try to imagine a world without it. And I mean a functioning world - not a "would be nice" version of it.

Read the Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson.

If you want an easy and entertaining read on this topic, try Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing. Money is fiction, but it's a helpful fiction.

Money is a slice of the country's economic output.

money is a form of debt

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