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Why We Need Money

ThaoNguyen Tran-Ngo
8 min readNov 10, 2021

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A 8-minutes, short history of money for people who use them (with a lot of images).

Photo by Mathieu Stern on Unsplash

Backstory

In my memory, it was a swelteringly hot day in October. Differed from the northern region where the cold breeze of winter greeted, the surprising heat shock of a tropical land like Vietnam made a day in October feel no different than an Equinox. And as the temperature staggeringly increased, so did my craving for a sweet, refreshing, cold coconut juice.

I did not know the heat was not the only thing that surprised me.

When I made my usual travel to the nearby convenience store for my coconut, I got the second surprise of the day. The coconut I starved for was none in sight; instead, a big, red “Out of Stock” sign was placed on the aisle.

At that moment, my third surprise came as a question hit me — what was the point of having money when you could not use it?

Photo by 金 运 on Unsplash

That was the trigger for me to find the meaning of money- the meaning behind one of the most ancient tools of human-kind communications (apart from language). Without further ado, here is a shortened version of the history of money and why we need it.

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ThaoNguyen Tran-Ngo
ThaoNguyen Tran-Ngo

Written by ThaoNguyen Tran-Ngo

Marketing by day, pondering on questions by night.

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