Buy Crypto! A cryptocurrency painting

A painting about cryptocurrency

Medium: Oil on Canvas
SizeWidth: 36 inchesHeight: 24 inches

East Riding Artists organised an exhibition, titled 'All that glitters is not gold' in the beautiful Burton Constable Hall in the East Riding of Yorkshire, England.

So I entered this painting about cryptocurrency.

I have been approached by telephone, email and on Facebook about buying cryptocurrency. It took a firm 'No' to shake off the foreign-sounding guy who rang me on the phone using a probably fake English phone number.

I have noticed that there is nothing I can do with cryptocurrency - nowhere I shop, either online or in the physical world, accepts the darned stuff. It seems a lot of people just buy cryptocurrency because it is, well, cryptocurrency and appears to constantly go up in value. That sounds like a Ponzi scheme to me. But what do I know?

I recently read an expert-written article in a respected British newspaper which pointed out that crypto-currency is only worth what people on the internet say it is. There is no regulated body which guarantees its value. It is unlike say a national currency which is backed up by the support of a central bank. Or a share certificate which is a share in a company backed by law and regulation. Or a government savings bond which is also backed by the government concerned.

Update: recently a crypto exchange failed and thousands of people lost a total of £8 billion dollars. The exchange was called FTX, run by a guy called Sam Bankman-Fried, who is now serving a jail sentence in the USA. This should be interesting to watch as it plays out. I have noticed that in East Yorkshire people who buy cryptocurrency tend to be people who have little money to invest. I hope that FTX customers get their money back, and that they could afford to lose it in the first place. I suspect the answer is they won't and they couldn't.

So here we poke fun at the cryptocurrency world. The guy on the hooded sweater represents some of the people who buy and sell cryptocurrency, and buy and sell illegal goods and services with it. The screen at the top left shows the biggest cryptocurrencies, but there are hundreds more with new ones being created every day. The graph on the right shows the fluctuations in crypto values. And of course the Bitcoins glitter below. Of course there is no such thing as a physical Bitcoin, just to be clear. Finally we are asked to 'Buy Crypto' and 'Add to Cart'.

This painting was fun to create. I hope you like it.