Zcash is the shitcoin story of the week. A critical vulnerability in its Orchard privacy pool reportedly sat undetected for four years. A researcher using Anthropic's Opus model found it, built a local exploit, and showed that the bug could have enabled undetectable counterfeit ZEC. Zcash says there is no evidence it was exploited, but the whole point of the privacy system is that you cannot easily prove what happened inside it.
The narrative machine immediately kicked in: AI is now so powerful that every security system on the internet is at risk. Maybe. That is probably part of the story. But there is a much simpler explanation too: Zcash was so irrelevant for so long that no one serious spent enough time looking. The entire market cap of Zcash is less than a couple days' volume on bitcoin.
Shitcoin narratives spring to life and die before I even have time to address them. Privacy coin. DeFi coin. AI coin. Ethereum killer. Bitcoin killer. The pitch changes, the incentives do not. A small group of insiders wraps a fragile system in a big story, retail buys the story, and then everyone pretends the obvious failure was impossible to see.
This is one of the many reasons I focus on bitcoin only. Simplicity matters. Liquidity matters. Security budget matters. The number of people trying to break the thing matters. Bitcoin is attacked every day by the best-resourced adversaries in the world, and it keeps producing blocks.