Some people don’t seem to enjoy bitcoin no matter how far it goes, but when one of those people is Jared Kenna – a man who ultimately got rich off of it – the odds don’t look too great.
Jared Kenna Discusses His “Bitcoin Plight”
Kenna is one of bitcoin’s earliest millionaires, but his presence within the crypto tech world has ultimately faded over the past three years. This has been for several reasons, the biggest one being that he’s lost his “love for the industry,” according to a recent message on Twitter.
Kenna believes that the crypto industry has become something of a Frankenstein’s monster: a space in which people are less concerned with doing the right thing and changing the world for the better and more interested in building their own names and wealth. This is not why Kenna got involved in crypto. He believed it had the ability to revolutionize finance, and while he’s still confident that bitcoin and blockchain have great strengths, he doesn’t see people capitalizing on those strengths properly, choosing instead to use them for personal gain.
In a recent interview with Bloomberg, he discussed how bitcoin was viewed in the early days:
All we talked about were things that actually had substance, and very few people were talking about making money. Now, the only thing people seem to focus on is making money.
In 2017, Kenna heard a radio ad that really startled him. The ad implied that since bitcoin was spiking to such a degree, people shouldn’t think twice about mortgaging or refinancing their homes in the name of bitcoin. In other words, take out that second mortgage on your domicile and use it to buy as many BTC units as possible.
Kenna recalls scowling at the ad, saying that this was not what crypto was all about. He was also very disgusted by the initial coin offering (ICO) craze that occurred that same year. Many of those ICOs turned out to be fraudulent or fake, and several investors lost their life savings while these companies vanished into thin air with riches they didn’t earn, much less deserve.
Some Things Don’t Change for the Better
He further states:
I was in Miami last week and I went to a crypto event, and it was full of beautiful models looking for men. I was like, ‘this has changed.’
In all, he believes the crypto industry has become more about show than committing to long-lasting (positive) results. In addition, he’s also gone through some personal ups and downs that led to his decision to leave the industry. Some of those downs include erasing some 800 bitcoins from a computer in 2010 – worth more than $6.5 million by today’s prices – and a hack that saw him lose several million more in 2016.