Money is simply a portable medium of exchange with an agreed upon value per unit. Of itself, it is benign. Once it is touched by humans, things get complicated.

The importance or influence of money on time is inverse to its quantity.

If you make $8 per hour with no job security, benefits, etc., there is a very strong negative relationship. You are trading time (life) for survival. If you are a billionaire who left surviving behind long ago (or inherited your wealth), money has no relationship to time at all.

But you are right, barter is useless beyond the personal. Money, for better or worse, will always be with us.

My view is that when money becomes the object of lust, it is always destructive. Lust and avarice combine to make one very powerful bomb, a sort of mega-deadly sin.