[monob]

You have use value and exchange value.

Exchange value is most often price, but it is in reality the vector of the equivalent amount of goods and services you will receive for a unit of some good or service.

The point of money is that it collapses all exchange values to two vectors, one for selling to money, one for buying with money.

The downside of money is that it hides many very obvious relationships. In a topical case, that the cost of video cards has essentially stayed constant when expressed as etherium units.

tl;dr: money lets you calculate prices as n, exchange values needs n^2.