Nothing is less material than money. . . . Money is abstract, I repeated, money is future time. It can be an evening in the suburbs, it can be the music of Brahms, it can be maps, it can be chess, it can be coffee, it can be the words of Epictetus teaching us to despise gold. Money is a Proteus more versatile than the one on the island of Pharos.
I think this is a rosy-eyed view. Money is a formalised manifestation of debt, which previously was an informal system of reciprocity and altruism. But formalising this debt with financial and monetary systems destroyed the altruistic part of the arrangement.
Graeber explains how money was created by states to enforce its authority and basically coerce people into participation. The anonymity of monetary debt and the fact that the system is controlled by the "powers that be" make it kind of the opposite of altruism.
I've always thought about it this way: We trade our time (work) for money and later trade that money for time (other's work). We see this manifestation in lots of places: bus is cheap but also costs time vs limousine is expensive but uses minimum time. Growing food is dirt cheap but also costs time vs buying produce is expensive but uses minimum time. This exchange has also allowed the producers to invest in efficiencies and economies of scale. All told, this is why I generally have a rule to not spend money on anything that doesn't buy me time, it is my most limited resource.
That sounds almost poetic. I wish people who mindlessly rail against capitalism on twitter actually took the time to understand how these systems work. I think many of them would like to believe that we can all live in a system without currency. They don't realize that much of the freedom we enjoy today comes from capitalism. The ability to start your own business, and more fundamentally, to decide how your money (and time) is spent. Communism and centralized control over resource utilization necessarily results in less freedom.
Along these lines, there is an excellent book by John Kenneth Galbraith - Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went (1975) that covers the whole history of money, with much details & wit
Nearly any currency when used in commerce is primarily used as an IOU for time. Due how the POW is designed to ensure immutability of the blockchain it also is dependent on how cheap it is to generate energy for the people who mine.
Comparing it to a bank with fiat a bank usually ensures the consistency of transactions so miners perform this action (and also developers of bitcoin if there are security holes) and your wallet is an account and bitcoin have a transaction cost which is like using a debit card associated with an account.
—Jorge Luis Borges, “The Zahir”
https://longreads.com/2016/06/14/borges-and-money/