Personally never been a fan of the digital gold narrative. Bitcoin is not fungible, and that will prove to be an increasingly bigger problem over the next decade.

Bitcoin was supposed to be a "Peer to Peer electronic cash system", but now it has strayed far from that original vision. As more and more people realize they are being tracked and traced, there will be a shift towards private coins.

Zcash in particular stands out to me because of the team behind it and the underlying technology. It offers the best privacy when compared to any other coin. Also the team behind it is doing some ground breaking work for scalability that could have positive implications for many other blockchains besides Zcash. I encourage you to take a look at their recent developments with Halo, also ZK-Starks are something to keep an eye on..

Interesting to note: Hal Finney(@halfin) followed 17 twitter accounts before he passed away. One of these accounts is the @zerocoinproject which is twitter account for the Zero Coin Protocol, which is what $zec is built with.