Conceptual work created by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan was sold at auction in New York last week
The cryptocurrency entrepreneur Justin Sun has fulfilled a promise he made after spending $6.2m (£4.88m) on an artwork featuring a banana duct-taped to a wall – by eating the fruit.
At one of Hong Kong’s priciest hotels, Sun, 34, chomped down on the banana in front of dozens of journalists and influencers after giving a speech hailing the work as “iconic” and drew parallels between conceptual art and cryptocurrency.
“It’s much better than other bananas,” Sun, who was born in China, said after getting his first taste. “It’s really quite good.”
“Entrepreneur.”
Gentle reminder that you cannot make money in crypto unless someone else loses money. It’s not entrepreneurship. At best, it’s scam artistry, at worst fraud or theft.
Wouldn’t that also describe wall street in general?
To some extent. Speculation on the stock market used to be illegal until the 80’s, meaning that investments had to be based on a company’s tangible performance. Companies are not ephemeral, like crypto, but represent real people doing real work. So the stock market is not a zero-sum game (like musical chairs).
Crypto is fundamentally different. Bitcoins have no utility. They don’t “do” anything (except consume ungodly amounts of power to no discernible end).
Let me put it this way: if Microsoft died tomorrow, some would chortle with secret delight, but the truth is that a lot of our infrastructure would need to be rebuilt from scratch — hundreds of thousands of jobs lost, computer networks, servers, websites, gaming and cloud ecosystems would be decimated. Something like 25% of the internet would be down.
If bitcoin disappeared tomorrow nothing would happen, because bitcoin isn’t real. It does nothing and represents nothing. It’s a distillation of the most purified nothing that ever was. If bitcoin vanished that would be a boost for the environment and a boost for the economy (as people stop pissing away money by buying literal nothing).
The good old days. Every month I discover a new good regulation that we lost :(
Tbf, money isn’t real. Blips on a monitor.
Wouldn’t this describe any economy…?
Good point. I agree it would
I’m sure the banana wasn’t what the money was for. It was the cache of weapons and drugs being delivered somewhere.
I mean, that’s capitalism in a nutshell no? Unless you’re a government mint, No one can make money unless someone else loses money.
Yes, if you consider paying for service to be losing money. If you invest in a company and it succeeds, you earn a portion of the money (in exchange to providing some up-front). In theory, this is a win-win-win situation: the investor gets a return, the company gets capital to get things going, customers get a new product/service provider.
That said, things like stock trading, especially high-frequency trading, do seem to function in this way.
Yes, if you invest in a company you initially lose money while the company gains money.
You invest so that eventually you get money back, which means the company pays you back and therefore loses money.
The money the company pays you with is money that the company gained by other people’s such as clients and customers giving them money for their service, and therefore they lose their money which eventually ends up in your pocket as your investment starts to earn you money.
In the end the company and the investor earn money if the company is successful but ultimately the the money comes from the customers who are losing that money.
I only take issue with the phrasing of “losing money” - but if we agree that that’s just semantics (because everybody is getting value for their money), then yeah, I completely agree
Currency yes, but value no. In fact that’s part of why you can’t set currency at a set number of dollars per person. If you did that currency would deflate
Depends on what you mean by “money” I guess, but banks create money every day when they give out loans for more money than they actually have.