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.”

  • Pyr_Pressure@lemmy.ca
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    3
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    3 days ago

    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.

    • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      2 days ago

      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

    • ieatpillowtags@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      2 days ago

      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.

    • KubeRoot@discuss.tchncs.de
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      2 days ago

      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.

      • Pyr_Pressure@lemmy.ca
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        2 days ago

        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.

        • KubeRoot@discuss.tchncs.de
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          2 days ago

          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