Luis Marx's Banksy-Inspired Shredder Visualizes Stock, Crypto Profit and Loss — Using Banknotes

Engineer Luis Marx has recreated Banksy's famous self-shredding artwork, with a twist: His Raspberry Pi- and Arduino-powered variant shreds banknotes, as a way of visualizing his portfolio's profit and loss.

"In this video I built a picture frame with an integrated money shredder to clearly visualize the stock market prices of my portfolio," Marx explains, in translation, of his project. "The invention is controlled by a Raspberry Pi and an Arduino. The Raspberry Pi uses Python to query the prices of the stocks or Dogecoins from a stock exchange API and then calculates whether I have made a profit or a loss. The Arduino then operates the money shredder or money refill mechanism."

The frame itself is inspired by an artwork by notorious graffiti artist Banksy, who placed one of his creations in a frame and had it sold at auction — only to remotely trigger a built-in mechanism to shred the artwork as soon as it was sold. It remains unclear whether a malfunction left the piece only half-shredded, as per the artist's claim, or if it was always meant to end that way — but the stunt certainly didn't harm the item's value.

"If I make a profit, new bills come in from above," Marx explains of his twist on the theme, "and when I make a loss then money is shredded."

The frame contains a shredder and a simple bill dispenser, both controlled by an Arduino-compatible microcontroller which is in turn driven by a Raspberry Pi Zero Wireless responsible for querying application programming interface (APIs) through which changes in the stock and cryptocurrency markets can be tracked.

The full video is available on Marx's YouTube channel, though the source code and schematics have not yet been made public.