Recently, ZEC's performance has been truly eye-catching — rising from $50 to $730, nearly 15 times since the beginning of the year, with a market cap once surpassing $13 billion. Such a surge inevitably attracts many people wondering if they can pick up a bargain, but the problem is that there are many pitfalls behind this market rally.

First, let's talk about mining machines. Bitmain's Antminer Z15 Pro can now mine over $50 per day. At this rate, it would take 105 days to break even, translating to an annualized return of around 350%. Sounds crazy, right? The issue is that these figures often only last a few months. Looking back at history, PoW projects like FIL, XCH, RVN, once their break-even periods drop below 120 days, they generally have no future, and eventually, the prices all collapse collectively.

This is the so-called "hardware-price scissors" playing tricks. When the coin price surges, mining hardware manufacturers take the opportunity to sell futures mining machines at several times the normal price — for example, the Z15 Pro futures are sold at $4,999, with delivery scheduled for April 2026. It looks good, but when the machines are finally delivered en masse, the entire network hash rate will explode, difficulty will skyrocket exponentially, and miners will face a double whammy of "coin price halving and production halving." This kind of pattern is not new; history keeps repeating itself.