The thing people keep repeating is that they have seen this before.
"We were here in 2022."
"We were here in 2018."
"It crashed before and came back."
Comforting.
Unfortunately, it is also intellectually lazy.
No, you have not seen this before.
The structure of the market has changed.
The participants have changed.
The incentives have changed.
The ownership has changed.
The game itself has changed.
Five years ago, much of the market consisted of retail believers. They bought the story. They held the story. They became emotionally attached to the story.
Today you opened the gates and invited institutions inside.
Congratulations.
Now you have people who do not care.
People whose job is not belief.
People whose job is extraction.
People who wake up every morning asking a single question:
"Where is the return?"
Not "What is the vision?"
Not "What is the mission?"
Not "What is the future of money?"
The return.
That is all.
The retail investor falls in love.
The institution falls in love with performance.
The moment performance disappears, so does the romance.
That is why the comparison with previous cycles fails.
The old market was dominated by true believers.
The new market contains allocators, hedge funds, quantitative traders, arbitrage desks, structured products, and professional speculators.
These people are not HODLing.
They are positioning.
They are not defending a philosophy.
They are managing exposure.
They do not regard BTC as a cause.
They regard it as inventory.
And inventory gets sold.
The amusing part is that many people still imagine institutional capital as some kind of permanent seal of approval.
It is not.
Institutional money is the least loyal money on earth.
It arrives because there is an opportunity.
It leaves because there is a better one.
And if a falling market presents more opportunity than a rising one, it will happily profit from the decline.
A retail investor sees a crash and thinks, "I should hold."
A professional trader sees a crash and thinks, "I should make money from it."
Those are very different species.
You wanted Wall Street.
Wall Street arrived.
Now everyone seems shocked that Wall Street behaves like Wall Street.
The great irony is that BTC advocates spent years celebrating institutional adoption as though they had invited noble allies into the castle.
What they actually invited in were mercenaries.
Mercenaries do not defend castles.
They defend revenue streams.
And when the revenue moves outside the walls, they move with it.
That is why this cycle is different.
Not because prices fell.
Prices always fall.
Because the people holding the asset are no longer the same people.
And unlike the true believers, they are perfectly happy making money on the way down.
> time travel back to 2023:
> have $10,000 USD to my name
> jam $10,000 into Pepe April 2023
> sell at 1.5B on Binance listing
> have $15,000,000 USD
> jam $15m into sol at $20
> sell sol at $100 in Jan 2024
> have $75,000,000 USD
> buy 3m USD of Pepe at 300m market cap
> sell Pepe at 10b on Robinhood listing
> have $172,000,000
> sprinkle 1-3% of mog, spx, hyperliquid
> jam $25,000,000 into Trump $1.00
> sell everything when Trump hits $75
> have $2,000,000,000 USD
> short the entire market on tariff and wars
> have $10,000,000,000 USD
> pay 50% taxes
> have $5,000,000,000 debt free
> fuck off into the sunset forever
You know it's bad for Zcash when nobody has even mentioned that Epstein was a major investor in Electric Coin Company. And helped its founder with a wire transfer to the Virgin Islands right before the fork. Many unanswered quedtions. It's a dirty copany, shilled by dirty people.
$ZEC IS GOING TO ZERO
I AM CALLING IT FIRST.
$ZEC is finished. Nobody knows if the supply is 21M any more.
All trust is gone. You’d have to be a fools to invest your money in it now.
🚨🇺🇸The Senate just killed the SAVE Act, 48-50.
Voter ID and proof of citizenship, supported by over 80% of Americans, dead.
Four Republicans voted no: Tillis, Murkowski, McConnell, Collins.
The uniparty showed its face today...
The game theory of "exploiting" the Zcash bug is much more complex.
"If the Zcash bug were exploited, we would have seen a large outflow from the Orchard pool."
No, it's not that simple.
A sophisticated hacker would not have just withdrawn from the shielded pool and sold tokens. Why? Because once they are out of the pool, there is basically no way to launder a large sum of money.
The orchard pool itself is actually the best way to launder counterfeit ZEC. The best scenario for a hacker is if (1) they remain the only party with counterfeit ZEC and (2) the Orchard pool remains in operation (not drained), so the hacker can launder the ZEC slowly (say, direct OTC within the Orchard pool over a longer period of time).
Can we rule this out? Yes, this can be ruled out if we ask most ZEC holders in Orchard to withdraw (i.e. drain the pool).
Another angle of attack that could have been executed which is hard to rule out: the hacker could have taken a large but ordinary-looking short position on ZEC after finding the exploit. This strategy is even plausibly deniable--you can reap rewards from knowing about the exploit early with little risk. Since there's a liquid perp market on ZEC, it's possible to "hide" a significant short position (worth millions) without moving markets significantly or leaving suspicious traces.
A sophisticated hacker could have run a combination of the two strategies above.