Cobo CEO Shenyu: ZEC Still Haunts Him
Cobo co-founder and CEO Shenyu recalled on social media that he has "really been haunted" by ZEC (Zcash), sharing a personal experience from the night the project launched its mainnet in 2016.
According to Shenyu, when Zcash launched its mainnet in 2016, the cryptocurrency derivatives exchange BitMEX had set a price ceiling for ZEC at 10 BTC, indicating that the market had extremely high price expectations for ZEC at its launch, even nearing the platform's set price limit.
Shenyu recalled that on the night of Zcash's mainnet launch, shortly after he started mining with his GPU mining rig, the transformer at his GPU farm was struck by lightning and damaged, which directly interrupted his participation in the early mining of the coin.
Since that transformer lightning strike incident, Shenyu stated that ZEC has not appeared in his personal wallet again, implying that he has neither held, mined, nor purchased the token since, marking this experience as a symbolic moment of "disrupted fate" with ZEC.
Shenyu's sharing carries a nostalgic and self-deprecating tone about his early mining experience, reflecting the high-risk and high-uncertainty mining environment faced by early participants in the cryptocurrency industry around 2016 during the launch phase of altcoins, where hardware failures and natural disasters could directly impact the results of individual early asset accumulation.
From an industry perspective, BitMEX's setting of a 10 BTC price ceiling for Zcash at its mainnet launch reflects the extreme speculative sentiment in the market regarding the initial launch of emerging privacy coins, necessitating exchanges to control risk exposure through price circuit breakers; while cases like Shenyu's, where early miners missed out on early holdings due to equipment failures, also illustrate the considerable randomness in the early wealth distribution of altcoins, which is not solely determined by participants' judgment or capital scale.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
Zcash launched its mainnet in October 2016, being the first cryptocurrency project to implement transaction privacy protection using zk-SNARKs zero-knowledge proof technology on a large scale. On its first day, due to extremely low circulation combined with market enthusiasm for its technological narrative, the coin's price was pushed to levels equivalent to several bitcoins, becoming one of the most famous cases of "extreme premium at new coin launch" in cryptocurrency history; Shenyu, as one of the earliest Bitcoin miners and pool operators in China, had been actively involved in the core mining platform ecosystem.
Shenyu's mining experience essentially reflects the path logic of early cryptocurrencies where "hash power is capital"—miners exchange hardware (GPUs, mining rigs) and electricity resources for original tokens of new coins, rather than purchasing them directly from the secondary market. The returns from this path highly depend on the normal operation of hardware and the network's hash power share. If equipment unexpectedly fails (e.g., due to lightning), miners may miss out on the early low-difficulty, high-efficiency golden window for that coin's network.
This is similar to classic cases of early Bitcoin miners permanently losing their mined bitcoins due to hard drive failures or discarded computers (e.g., Welshman James Howells mistakenly threw away a hard drive containing the private key for 7,500 bitcoins), highlighting the importance of physical device risks in the early acquisition and preservation of crypto assets. Zcash currently holds a leading position in the privacy coin sector, but overall market attention on privacy coins has significantly declined compared to the peak period of 2016-2017 amid tightening global regulations.
Essentially, this represents a random wealth distribution under a technology substitution path—early wealth accumulation in the crypto industry heavily relies on early positioning in emerging technology projects and hardware resource investment, but physical world random variables such as hardware failures and natural disasters can also directly determine whether participants can truly obtain early tokens. The core mechanism is that in a decentralized, intermediary-free mining system, individual miners must bear all hardware and environmental risks alone, contrasting sharply with traditional financial investment models where institutions disperse and hedge risks.
ABAB News · Cognitive Law
- Mining is not just about coins, but also about gambling with luck from the heavens.
- The distribution of early wealth is half vision, half whether the transformer can withstand a lightning strike.
- In a decentralized world, no one buys insurance for your hardware.