Kenji: (Watching him with amusement.) "You look like you just lost a private key."

Chang: (Exhales, shaking his head.) "Worse. I feel like I’m watching an entire industry build sandcastles, pretending they’re fortresses."

Kenji: (Slurping his broth.) "Ah. Here we go. The existential crisis of the blockchain engineer."

Chang: (Ignoring him.) "Every project I touch—every so-called 'decentralized' system—is just centralization with extra steps. Cloud-hosted nodes, single points of failure, compliance backdoors they pretend don’t exist."

Kenji: (Raises an eyebrow.) "You’re not just figuring this out now, are you?"

Chang: (Shaking his head.) "No, of course not. But it's getting worse. They’re moving away from resilience, not toward it. Everyone’s building 'trustless' systems on trusted infrastructure. It’s a joke."

Kenji: "And yet you’re still doing the work."

Chang: (Leans forward, lowering his voice.) "Because I still think we can make something that’s at least resistant. Not invulnerable—nothing is invulnerable—but something that can hold its ground. Something that doesn’t fall apart the second someone powerful decides they don’t like it."

Kenji: (Wiping his mouth with a napkin.) "That sounds like a fun fantasy. But you know as well as I do that nothing is unstoppable."

Chang: (Nods.) "Of course. Everything can be attacked. Everything can be pressured. But there’s a difference between something fragile and something resilient. Bitcoin taught us that much. It survived because of its architecture, not because it was perfect. But even it got captured, slowly co-opted by traditional finance."

Kenji: "So what, you think you can build something better than Bitcoin?"

Chang: (Laughs, shaking his head.) "No. I don’t think I can outsmart Satoshi. But I do think I can learn from what happened to Bitcoin—how it got integrated, compromised, bent into something more palatable for the system. I don’t want to build a revolution. I just want to build something hard enough to resist capture, at least for a while."

Kenji: (Nods slowly, considering.) "So you’re looking for resilience, not permanence."

Chang: (Finally picking up his chopsticks again, twirling them between his fingers.) "Exactly. Permanence is a myth. Everything degrades, everything adapts. But resilience? That’s achievable. If you design for it."

Kenji watched him for a long moment before leaning back with a smirk.

Kenji: "And let me guess—you think you’ve found someone crazy enough to let you build it?"

Chang exhaled, half-smiling. "Maybe."

Kenji clinked his beer against Chang’s bowl. "Then I hope you get to build it before the system chews you up, too."