Why do the techies typically not get rich in crypto? Over the last 15 years I have seen a lot of OGs get rich with Bitcoin. I wasn't one of them. I focused mainly on the problems: It's not scalable, it's not private, and there will be a lot of regulatory problems. Meanwhile the less technical OGs focused on the potential. They understood network effects, they understood that it's a 10x technology, and they developed a religious fervor that I simply wasn't able to develop. While I was looking for perfection they understood the concept of "good enough". When I sold my 100 BTC at a 6x gain (up from 5 EUR), they hodled. Years later, with Bitcoin in the 4 digits, I thought I'm too late now. It was only after the 2021 top that I was mentally in a position that allowed me to enter in size. Everybody is an investment genius in a bull market, what's mentally hard is to build and keep the conviction to hodl through a bear with more than -50% drawdowns. In a bull it's easy to fall into the trap to rotate into some mooncoin that performs better. But do you have the conviction that your mooncoin will recover when it's down -90% in a bear? That's why you need to read all the books and listen to all the podcasts and that's maybe why some people turn into quasi-religious Bitcoin maxis — to build that conviction. But it's that same conviction can cause you to miss the next 1000x opportunity. I have approximately one good investment idea per decade. In the early 2000s it was gold. In the 2010s it was Bitcoin. In 2025 it became Zcash. They are all based around the problems and opportunities caused by fiat money (→ Austrian economics) and how to mitigate them on an individual level (→ The Sovereign Individual) with harder monies. They take at least a decade to play out. I still consider all three great investments, but on different points on the risk and adoption curve (see post below). If you consider total global asset value, I think the following holds. Gold has a potential upside of maximally 10x from here, which would mean it becomes the dominant money again. Bitcoin has a potential upside of maximally 100x from here. 10x would make it as big as gold is now, a 100x would mean it becomes the dominant store of value in the world. When I wrote my Zcash investment thesis three months ago (at $44 ZEC) I thought that it had a potential upside of 1000x, so now at $220 it's still a ~250x from here. That's a world where BTC is at $1M and ZEC at $50k. A world where Bitcoin is about as big as gold is now and the private counterpart Zcash is 5% as big. That's not even total moon math, it just assumes that Bitcoin keeps growing at lower rates than before to the size of gold and that Zcash becomes the dominant privacy coin and the demand for a private SoV is as big as 5% of the BTC market cap. For me ZEC offers the best possible return on a risk adjusted basis, but I allocate to all three: XAU, BTC, ZEC. Just this time around I'm trying not to repeat the same mistakes and exit at a low multiplier, get shaken out in a bear market, or focus only on the potential problems. It's not too late now and this is not a short term play. Luckily as a privacy focused techie Zcash makes it easier for me to not focus on the technical problems. Zcash offered ledger indistinguishability from the start, it's usable now with @zashi_app and their NEAR Intents (@NEARProtocol) integration, and it has a credible scalabilty roadmap with Project Tachyon (follow @ebfull). This is obviously not financial advice, I cannot predict the future, but I'm sure it's going to be one hell of a decade ahead, however the chips may fall 😎