The early cult-like municipal crypt animated in San Francisco is gone
Ah, those were the years. In 2012, the young Jered Kenna ruled as the landlord of 20Mission, where tenants in the “anarchic municipality” paid rent in Bitcoin and gathered in the common room on the second floor for animated discussions about the potential of crypto to change the world.
The first five years, Kenna said in a recent interview with Mission Local, were “some of the best years of my life.”
But for Kenna and many other early adopters, those years are gone.
“I have not had a crypto for a long time, I lost most of it due to identity theft,” Kenna said. He no longer buys cryptocurrency. ‘I’m really inactive. I have always been interested in the actual use and not speculation, he said.
For Kenna, the collapse of Bitcoin in June, accompanied by a series of other heavy blows to the industry, was “long overdue … I think a lot of cryptocurrency investment was pretty insane.”
“There are things that are actually useful and they are useful, and then there is a lot of shit. People invest in all this nonsense and pay millions of dollars for JPEG,” he added.
Nevertheless, investors remain
Unlike Kenna, many in the mission still have the currency, which is now valued at around $ 20,000 per coin, steeply down from the top of nearly $ 70,000 in November 2021. The early tension has disappeared and many are looking at it with a detached skepticism. Others waver between doubt and faith.
Take Han, a 27-year-old programmer who has lost more than half of $ 7,000 or so he invested in Bitcoin. It hurts, but still the attraction is there. Bitcoin speaks to His soul: “I think cryptocurrency is trying to build a new kind of human consensus and break the order of our established system. It has the potential to change the structure of the world, and that is what I look forward to, he said.
Others are more detached.
‘I’m just a holder. I do not care about that, says Andrew Ward, 38, an event producer. “I hope that crypto will be a mechanism that we can use as an alternative and imposed monetary regime. So it’s more that I support it philosophically.”
About one person uses it every day.
Casher Kuldeep on the BITCOIN ATM at Mission Grocery & Liquor
Around noon last Friday, Stephanie Pakrul, a web developer, considered whether to make a crypto transfer. She has been following crypto for nine years, and has become increasingly indifferent to its dramatic ups and downs. Yet her enthusiasm has its limits. “It’s not something I want to tell my friends who are not interested in buying, for who knows?” in Pakrul.
What can go wrong?
For Kenna, the accidents of the unknown were two: identity theft and the pandemic.
“Everything was great for the most part until the pandemic,” he said. Until then, the municipality of Kanna continued to accept payments in Bitcoin, and residents used the two Bitcoin ATMs that had been in place since early 2016.
But as the pandemic continued, the rooms at 20Mission emptied. Bleeding money, the bank banned the building. “Believe me, if I still had crypto, I would not have lost the building,” said Kenna, who could not keep up with mortgages and property taxes.
Kenna’s loss seems like a fitting case study for John Prins, the former Black Rock chief executive, who warned: “Never, ever invest in cryptocurrency to make money.”
Crypto, he said, does not produce anything valuable. “You can not think of cryptocurrency in the same way as you think of stocks and bonds. It’s just not the same, he said. “Cryptocurrency has not found its future yet.”
But some are still convinced that it will. “I think it has a future,” said Timothy Guo, co-president of Blockchain at Berkeley, a student-run organization that has designed the world’s first university-accredited course in blockchain, the technology behind cryptocurrencies.
Blockchain, they said, takes out the “middleman” and emphasizes trust in code instead of people. “Because even though it may not be perfect right now, it is a large society that really, really believes in the philosophy of cryptocurrencies, is constantly working to improve it, find new uses and help make the world a more democratic, just place. . “
Elquis Castillo II is another former crypto enthusiast. He used to see crypto as the “business of the future” and began extracting Bitcoins in high school. “It’s almost like a cult,” said the 24-year-old, who withdrew because he began to see the lack of a “true profit principle.”
Another early seller of crypto sticks to it
Like Kenna, Jack Jia, now senior director of ConsenSys, a blockchain software technology company, was part of the early believers group. Jia was also the first employee in Wyre, a crypto FinTech startup that was renamed from Snapcard and acquired by the payment company Bolt. But when it was still Snapcard, it was Jia’s boss who tried (and failed) to persuade Bay Area stores – including those on the mission – to accept Bitcoin.
“There was basically no adoption at the time because we had entered a bear market for crypto. And the technology was untested. The traditional world of Web 2.0 did not take this so seriously.”
Nevertheless, Jia remains in the industry and exudes enthusiasm. “The future has never been brighter,” Jia said. The recent collapse, he added, was almost inevitable. “Two and a half years of bear market, one and a half years of beef racing. These things happened almost mathematically,” he said.
“You can not allow these timid events to dictate a black-and-white general statement about crypto in general or blockchain technology. It’s a revolutionary thing,” Jia said. , as well as an increasing trend towards acceptance of cryptocurrency.
This is not the case among mission merchants. The only Coinsource Bitcoin ATM left in San Francisco is located inside Mission Grocery & Liquor between 17th and 18th streets.
“About one person uses it every day,” said treasurer Kuldeep – a figure that has hardly changed since the machine was first installed in May 2016, when the cryptocurrency was traded for just $ 500 per coin.
Hope and reality
On the former 20Mission, now 20Mish, only 10 or so of the 41 rooms are occupied. The two Bitcoin ATMs have disappeared, and the common room on the second floor, which was once filled with residents talking about the future of Bitcoin, is deserted and in disrepair.
But as the conversation with Kenna continues, he softens his own attitude and sees hope. As more and more financial institutions become involved in cryptocurrencies, he said one day, “it is likely that you do not necessarily know that you are using it. I think it’s really possible that you want to use another platform that has cryptocurrency on the back. “
“Just the fact that branding and networking and everything is very strong, that’s the biggest resource it has,” he said. “Everything that does not kill it, makes it stronger, can be used here.”
Still, Kenna, who has moved to Texas, is out of the crypto market. His primary business: 20Mission Cerveza, a brewery in Colombia.
