Privacy as Insurance Against AI
Three pressures. One underlying force. Attention comes first. Belief follows. Then capital moves.
AI is creating three pressures simultaneously.
Privacy: your context is the most valuable thing you own in an AI world. Every conversation, every preference, every pattern. Hand it to a centralised provider and it's accessible to their employees, compliance teams, future acquirers, future breaches. You're giving the most valuable thing away for free.
Security: people with no engineering background are shipping AI-built code to production right now. The attack surface is expanding faster than anyone can defend it.
Financial security: AI is disrupting work. Money is getting tight. The people who don't control their own data and their own financial rails are the most exposed.
Three pressures. One underlying force.
So what do you do with that?
I follow signals. And we got a massive one in October 2025, when Naval Ravikant framed $ZEC as "insurance against Bitcoin."
We then saw a massive spike in attention as price surged from $40 to $750. Most saw this as a pump and dump. I see it as a test on the broader public to see whether this narrative has legs.
Since then, the signals have kept stacking:
- The SEC investigated the Zcash Foundation for two and a half years. January 2026, they closed it. No enforcement action.
- a16z Crypto named privacy "the biggest moat in crypto" for 2026. Coinbase Ventures listed it as a core investment focus.
- Grayscale filed to convert its Zcash Trust into the first US-listed privacy coin ETF. Pending approval.
- The EU's Anti-Money Laundering Regulation bans privacy coins from regulated exchanges starting July 2027.
Attention comes first. Belief follows. Then capital moves. I trade where the attention goes.
$ZEC diverged from $BTC five months ago. 20 weeks of consolidation after the initial push. It's running its own structure now.
I'm betting with my own money that the $40 to $750 move was a test, not the main event.
For me this is a matter of when, not if. I don't know when. That's not within my control. That's the hardest part.
This isn't advice. It's a thesis.