And then, at night, I slip out.

I walk past the hotel bars, the sponsored parties, the lobbies full of people saying just one more drink, just one more meeting. I walk until the noise thins out, and there is a small cinema with a sign and a handful of strangers buying tickets or the comfort of Netflix in this case.

I sit down in the dark and give myself to a story about a very small life.

Last year, it was a man who cleaned toilets and watched trees.
This year, it is a man who builds railroads and loses everything in a fire.

The film is called Train Dreams, but it could have been called a hundred other things:
Small Man Under a Big Sky.
How Progress Forgets Your Name.
What Happens to a Body After the Fire Goes Out?

What a masterpiece.....

A man stands in the West, early in the last century. He is not important. He is not a symbol yet. He is just a body hired to move wood and iron where someone else wants the wood and iron to go.

They call him Robert Grainier. He carries his name like he carries the tools: without much ceremony. He does not narrate his life. He works, he eats, he sleeps, he loves a woman, he holds a child.

He helps build a bridge. He watches men drag a Chinese worker to the edge and nearly throw him off. He is there. He is part of it, or he fails to stop it, which is the same weight in the end. Something enters his life in that moment. You can call it guilt or a curse or history putting its hand on his shoulder. It doesn’t matter what word you choose. It is there, sitting in the corner of every scene that follows.

And then the fire comes.

He is off working when it happens. The forest goes up. The house goes up. His wife and daughter become smoke and heat and then nothing, and by the time he comes back, there is only ash and a silence so loud it might as well be another character in the film.

From there, the story does not explode. It doesn’t race toward revenge or justice. It does something more frightening. It just keeps going.

He builds another cabin.
He hauls more wood.
He passes through winter.
He listens to wolves and stories and the sound of trains at night.
He watches a biplane carve a line across the sky, a new machine from a new world that is already beginning without him.

The years pile up like snow on his roof. No one comes to rescue him from himself. No one gives him a grand speech to explain why. He is a man alone with the century, and the century does not particularly care who he is.

He dies as he lived: quietly. No orchestra, no headline. The camera lingers on the land he walked and the tracks he helped lay, and that is the whole sum of it.

And yet when the lights come up, on in this case I do it myself, my chest hurts.

What is it that hurts?

It isn’t just the tragedy. You can find tragedy anywhere.
It isn’t just poverty or misfortune or the cruelty of fire.

What hurts is seeing how a life can be folded into a system so completely that the system gets a name and a museum and a chapter in history, and the life itself is left behind like a used nail in the dirt.

The railroad will be remembered.
The frontier will be remembered.
The line on the map will be remembered.

Robert Grainier, in this case, will not.

We tell ourselves we live in a different time. We don’t swing axes over railroad ties; we push code into repositories, push transactions onto chains, push new layers over old ones until we forget what was there first. We say infrastructure now instead of track. We say network instead of line. We say user instead of passenger.

But when I watch this man in the forest, I recognize something I cannot easily dismiss.

>We are still building things that are larger than us.
>We are still selling our hours to visions we do not fully control.
We are still told that this is progress, and that progress is always good, and that if we are tired, burned out, or left behind, it is only because we did not run fast enough.

The film says something simpler and harder:

Sometimes progress is just a train that needs bodies.

There is another wound in Train Dreams, and it is quieter than fire.

It is the wound of what men do with sorrow when they have no language for it.

Grainier loses his family, and the world offers him little in the way of help. There is no therapist in the next town, no hotline, no word like “trauma” softened by years of books and workshops. There is work. There is whisky. There is the forest. There are stories half-believed about curses and ghosts and God.

He does not sit down and say, I am broken.
He just walks more slowly. Eats alone. Stares a little longer at the sky.

He thinks the fire might be a punishment. For what he did. For what he allowed. For that day at the bridge. For all the small cruelties a man collects without looking too closely at them. He carries that thought the way he carries his tools: quietly, with his head slightly bowed.

Watching him, I think of all the people I know who have their own fires:
a company gone overnight, a balance wiped to zero, a message that ends a love, a diagnosis, a scandal, a quiet, shameful collapse on the inside.

We live in a time where there are more words for pain, and yet we are still not very good at using them. People disappear from the feeds and come back branded with new names, new projects, fresh bravado. They say they needed a break. They don’t talk about the nights staring at the ceiling or the feeling that the future has moved on without them.

We build systems that can account for every token, every transaction, every state change in a smart contract, and yet we have no ledger for this: the number of small lives scorched at the edges of progress, walking around with their insides turned to charcoal but still functioning, still building, still selling tickets for the next train.

Train Dreams gives that state a face. It gives it a body that grows older, a cabin that creaks, a dog that wanders, a landscape that mirrors a mind half-burned and half-stubbornly alive.

The man never names his grief. The film does it for him.

There is a temptation, after a movie like this, to comfort oneself with distance.

>That was another time, we say.
>Those were rough men in rough places.
>We live later, we know better, we have all these tools now.

But all our tools, for all their beauty, still sit on top of something older and more basic: the way we treat one another when the system wants us to look away.

Those men on the bridge with the Chinese worker did not invent hatred or convenience. They simply followed the current of what the project needed: a scapegoat, a reason, a little spectacle of power to remind everyone who was allowed to belong.

The fire that kills Grainier’s family is not a legal verdict or a moral argument. It is just a consequence stacked on top of other consequences: forests cut, land used, seasons shifting, risk ignored until the wind is wrong and the flames are right.

Today the bridges are made of code and policy, and infrastructure diagrams. The fires come in other forms: a crash, a rug, a memo, a law we did not read in time. But somewhere in there, still, people are being pushed to the edge because it is easier not to see them.

You can call it economics. You can call it geopolitics. You can call it “market cycles” or “creative destruction” if you like.

The film calls it something else: a man coming home to ash.

When I stopped the film in this case, I walked outside back into a world of ads and QR codes, and big promises about the future. People around me are talking about latency and throughput and onboarding and all the other beautiful, necessary, dangerous words that come with building anything large.

I find myself thinking of a simple, ugly question:

In this future we are building, what happens to a man like Robert Grainier?

Is there a place for someone whose gifts are small and physical and local?
Do we design systems that honor his labor, protect his land, remember his name?
Or does he once again become part of the anonymous cost—absorbed, spent, forgotten in the graphs we show on stage?

I don’t have a clean answer. But I know I don’t want to live in a world where the only visible people are founders and winners and avatars with the right ratio of followers. I know I don’t want to design rails that run straight over all the quiet lives and call it innovation.

Maybe that’s why I keep ending up like this: slightly buzzed on exhaustion and cheap conference wine, alone in a foreign city, watching films about men who will never speak on a panel.

Maybe it’s a kind of self-defense. A way of reminding myself that the point of all these systems is not the system itself. The point is the person standing alone in the forest after the fire, asking and now what? The point is whether he can still find a way to live that is not purely survival, not purely work, not purely being fuel for someone else’s dream.

I think I will keep this ritual.

Once a year, at least, I will leave the noise of whatever we are building and sit in the dark with a small life.

I will watch a man clean toilets, or haul timber, or stand on a bridge, or lose everything in a way that makes no sense and cannot be optimized. I will let his silence work on me. I will remember that all the words I throw around—progress, network, future, rail, chain—are only worth anything if they make room for people like him.

The trains will keep running. The code will keep compiling. The cities will keep filling with conferences and neon and promises.

But somewhere, in the back of my mind, there will always be that cabin in the woods, and a man sitting alone, hearing a train in the night and wondering if his life meant anything more than the hour he sold to lay the track.

If the answer is not yet, then we still have work to do.

Real work. Human work. The kind that counts a single quiet life as a victory, not a rounding error.

A few nights ago, somewhere between flight delays and Telegram pings, a @Zcash post slid into my timeline. A quiet video, yellow shield logo, 1:41 minutes. In the thumbnail, there’s a person in a floral dress, glasses, hair pulled back, the kind of slightly awkward framing that makes you think “oh god, the comments are going to be brutal.”

I almost kept scrolling. Instead, I tapped.

“Privacy allows people to think freely,” she says. “There’s the space inside your head where you can basically think whatever you want and be fairly confident that no one is reading your mind. You can reason about the world and reason about what should happen in the world.”

It’s a simple, almost gentle thought. Everyone I know in crypto claims to believe this. We repeat phrases like “financial privacy is a human right” at conferences between shit espresso shots. It’s on our slide decks, our panel bios, our pinned tweets.

Then I opened the replies.

Some people were defending her: “The hate Daira is getting is super fucked up… you can just show basic human decency.” “If your politics require you to dogpile one of the sharpest people in ZK because they’re trans, maybe your politics are the problem.”

Others were not even pretending:

“Look at him. What the fuck do you think people will say?”

Suddenly, the video wasn’t just a clip about privacy. It was a stage. A person speaking quietly about the interior of the mind, surrounded by a digital mob that couldn’t decide whether to mock, defend, desire, or erase her.

And here’s my first confession: I had no idea who she was.

I work in and around this industry. I speak on panels// Spaces (Against my will). I tweet threads about “the future of Web3” and “on-chain culture.” I can tell you the FDV of half a dozen L2s and the latest drama around MEV. But I couldn’t have told you that this person, who uses ze/hir pronouns, has been designing some of the actual cryptographic machinery that makes serious privacy possible.

That ignorance is on me. And I’m ashamed of it.

Because if I’m honest, most days I treat “privacy” as a narrative bullet point, not a discipline. I know just enough to sound supportive. I don’t know enough to truly understand the work or the people holding it up.

This essay is partly my attempt to fix that, to sit with what I saw in that thread and to think harder about the industry I claim to represent. But it’s not a PR piece for Daira, or for Zcash, or for any coin.

I’m writing this because what happened in that comment section says something ugly about us: about how we treat human expression, about who we allow to be a thinker in crypto, and about how quickly a community that worships “freedom” will crucify anyone whose body doesn’t fit the template.

And strangely, the best way I know to talk about this is through two old stories: martyrdom and Frankenstein.

A martyrdom in the timeline

When I saw that screenshot of the Zcash video and the comments beneath it, my brain didn’t go to “Crypto Twitter discourse.” It went to martyrdom paintings.

In those paintings, especially from the Baroque period, you often have one central figure, calm and strangely luminous, surrounded by chaos. The saint is about to be killed for something they believe: a faith, a truth, a refusal to bow. Around them swirl soldiers, onlookers, accusers. The executioners are all tension and muscle. The saint, usually, is looking upwards, not because they’re in denial, but because the painting is trying to show that their real drama is not with the crowd but with something above, or within.

Martyrdom, in its original sense, isn’t just about dying. The Greek martyr means “witness.” A martyr is someone whose life, and sometimes death, becomes a kind of testimony. Their body is turned into a screen where a society projects its anxiety about power, conscience, and obedience.

Scrolling that thread, I felt like I was staring at a 2025 remix of those canvases.

In the center: a cryptographer talking softly about the sanctity of the mind. She’s not yelling. She’s not dunking on anyone. She’s describing a theory space in privacy where you can think freely.

Around her: the crowd.

Some are kind. Some are furious. Some are bored jokers doing drive-by cruelty. Some are “just asking questions.” But taken together, they form the same ring you see in martyrdom art: a public stripping of dignity, a fixation on the body of the person who dares to speak.

Daira is not being killed. She’s not going to prison. I don’t want to cheaply inflate online harassment into physical persecution. But there is a kind of soft martyrdom here: a willingness, or maybe just a grim acceptance, to stand in the middle of the algorithmic colosseum and say something true, knowing that the cost will be thousands of strangers tearing apart your face, your gender, your existence.

We like to idolize dead martyrs in crypto: cypherpunk legends (Satoshi, anyone?), whistleblowers, figures like Snowden or Assange. We put their quotes on slides. We say we are building on their spirit.

But when a living human being, who actually builds privacy tech, steps into the light as a visibly trans woman and says, “Privacy matters because it protects the space where your mind can think,” a chunk of our community responds with:

“Look at him. What did you expect?”

It’s not just cruel. It’s revealing. It shows how conditional our respect for “freedom” really is.

Frankenstein in a floral dress

The other story that wouldn’t leave my head was Frankenstein, not just the original novel, but the more recent interpretations, like Guillermo del Toro’s film and the Penny Dreadful series.

Frankenstein, at its core, is about two figures:

• The creature, assembled from dead parts, brought to life, immediately rejected. Tender, articulate, capable of love and philosophy, yet treated as a monster because his body doesn’t fit any existing category.

• The creator, the scientist who crosses a line, who dares to make something new and is punished for hubris, for playing God, for disturbing the natural order.

What struck me, staring at that Zcash thread, was how Daira was being cast as both.

First, she was the creature.

People weren’t engaging with her ideas. They were engaging with her appearance. Her hairline, her dress, the contours of her face. They talked about her as if she were some kind of visual glitch that disqualified her from being taken seriously. It’s the same ugly reflex that has followed trans people for decades: the insistence that their bodies are “wrongly assembled,” “unnatural,” “against nature.” The village, seeing the "creature", picking up torches.

But second, she was Frankenstein, the scientist.

As I read more about her, I realized she has been in the guts of Zcash’s cryptography for years. She has worked on protocols with names like Sprout, Sapling, Orchard, cascading generations of zero-knowledge proofs. This is not influencer-level “I like privacy coins” talk. This is someone who has been helping invent the math that lets you prove you’ve done something on-chain without revealing everything about yourself to the world. Think of that....

In a sense, that’s exactly the sort of “forbidden knowledge” that people project onto Frankenstein: the power to make something that escapes normal control. To regulators and transparency evangelists, strong privacy looks like a monster. It can harbor crime, they say. It can hide the bad guys. It complicates the tidy picture of a KYC’d, fully surveilled future.

So here we are: a trans cryptographer who has assisted in “creating” this monster called strong privacy, and who also inhabits a body that many people in crypto code as “monstrous” simply by existing.

It’s hard to think of a more perfect Frankenstein double.

The tragedy, just like in Shelley’s story, is not that the monster exists. It’s that we don’t know how to live with it. We don’t know how to live with technologies that let people be opaque. We don’t know how to live with genders that don’t reassure us. We don’t know how to live with minds that don’t look like the LinkedIn archetype of “serious builder.”

So instead of learning, we lash out. We mock. We demand visibility and legibility, then punish anyone who actually shows up as something other than a glossy avatar.

Privacy as the right to an interior life

Let’s go back to Daira’s sentence:

“There’s the space inside your head where you can basically think whatever you want and be fairly confident that no one is reading your mind.”

It sounds obvious. But I realize how often I forget the weight of it.

I treat privacy like a feature: useful, nice to have, a competitive differentiator for protocols and wallets. But for many people, especially queer and trans people, privacy is not an add-on. It’s a survival infrastructure.

Think about what it means to transition in a world where your medical records, financial transactions, social connections, and online searches are all hoovered up by companies and states:

• If your employer, landlord, or family is hostile, privacy is the space in which you can experiment with your identity without instant retaliation.

• If your government thinks your existence is ideological contamination, privacy is the difference between being able to live a partial truth and being dragged onto a list.

• If you are trying to figure yourself out, privacy is the ability to browse, question, talk, and try on names without every click being logged, profiled, and sold.

In that sense, cryptographic privacy is not just about hiding assets. It’s about protecting interiority. It’s about building technological equivalents to that mental room where you can think freely.

And here comes the hard part: the industry I’m part of has, in many ways, failed to live up to this.

We’ve turned “on-chain transparency” into a fetish. We celebrate block explorers that let anyone dissect anyone’s history. We brag about “radical transparency” as if exposure were automatically a virtue. We design social protocols where your every interaction becomes an entry on a public ledger forever.

Then, when somebody shows up and says, “Maybe we should also build strong privacy, because not everyone wants their entire life to be an open-air museum,” we treat them like they’re suspicious. And if that person is trans, or neurodivergent, or otherwise visibly outside the norm, we don’t just question their ideas. We question their right to speak at all.

It’s not just hypocrisy. It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of what we claim to be doing.

If blockchains are supposed to shift power away from centralized intermediaries, then privacy is not the enemy of that project; it’s the condition that makes it safe. There is no meaningful freedom if every transaction you ever make becomes ammunition for someone else’s judgment or control.

And yet, in that thread, the person reminding us of this is treated as if she is the danger.

The shame of the half-educated evangelist

This is where my own discomfort comes in.

I have spent years hyping this space: writing essays, advising projects, cheering on “Web3 culture.” I’ve talked about community, coordination, and new forms of agency. I like big words. I like big visions.

But the Daira incident forced me to confront how shallow some of my understanding really is.

I can name L1s, partners, and token launches. I can talk about UX and memes, and social consensus. Yet I hadn’t bothered to learn the names of the people designing the cryptographic primitives that make any of this ethically defensible. I hadn’t learned what zero-knowledge really costs, mentally and emotionally, for the people building it.

More uncomfortably, I realized how often I have been in rooms, chats, or threads where trans people were the butt of the joke, and I stayed quiet. Not because I agreed, but because it felt “off-topic,” or because I didn’t want to derail the conversation, or because I assumed “this is just how crypto bros talk.”

I’m not proud of that.

The truth is, you can’t claim to represent an industry that talks about “freedom” and “inclusion” while silently letting it target some of its most vulnerable contributors. At some point, the contradiction catches up with you.

So this essay is partly an apology to the people building privacy tech whose names I’ve never bothered to learn, and to the people whose bodies and pronouns are treated as acceptable collateral damage in our meme wars.

But it is not a plea for everyone to be nice for niceness’s sake. I’m not arguing that you have to like Daira, or agree with Zcash or anyone, or believe in every design decision she’s been part of.

I’m arguing something simpler and, I hope, harder to dodge: if we can’t grant basic dignity to someone who is clearly contributing to the field, then all our talk of permissionless innovation and open collaboration is a lie.

What kind of community kills its own collaborators?

The reason I ended up connecting this story to martyrdom and Frankenstein is that both myths ask the same question from different angles:

What does a society do with someone who doesn’t fit?

Martyrdom asks about conscience: What do we do with someone whose belief challenges our power structure? Do we listen, or do we silence them?

Frankenstein asks it about form: What do we do with a body or a being that doesn’t match our categories? Do we adapt, or do we destroy it?

Crypto, for all its radical language, often chooses the second answer in both cases.

We love “the market of ideas” until someone shows up with a body that embarrasses us in front of normies. We love “permissionless participation” until a trans dev becomes the public face of a protocol. We love “decentralized communities” until those communities are asked to practice something more demanding than speculating together: basic human decency.

The Daira thread is not unique. It’s just unusually visible. The same dynamics play out when women speak on security issues, when Black or brown builders call out racism, and when queer founders bring up safety and inclusion. Bodies become proxies for tech tribalism. Harassment becomes a sport.

And we pretend it’s all unrelated to the code.

But here’s the thing: culture is part of the protocol.

Who feels safe contributing ideas? Who gets listened to? Who is quietly pushed out? These are not side issues. They shape what gets built, what gets prioritized, and who the tools actually serve.

If trans people, women, queer folks, disabled folks, and neurodivergent folks learn that speaking up will result in a dogpile of mockery, they will either leave or go silent. We will get an industry built mostly by those who already feel entitled to speak.

That’s not “open collaboration.” That’s a very narrow bandwidth of human experience masquerading as universality.

Protecting expression, not just one person

I want to be clear: I’m not writing this essay to play white knight for Daira. She doesn’t need me to rescue her. From what I can see, she’s been navigating far harsher environments than a nasty Twitter thread for years.

I’m writing this because her situation exposes a fracture line in our entire ecosystem.

If we let the loudest, cruelest voices set the tone, we don’t just hurt one person. We lower the collective ceiling of what’s possible. We signal to future contributors: If you look strange, or speak differently, or carry a complicated history, this might not be a safe place for you to think out loud.

And that’s catastrophic for a field that supposedly runs on collaborative thinking.

The best ideas in crypto, the genuinely new ones, almost never come from the median taste. They come from weird corners: from people who think sideways, who obsess over details nobody else notices, who have felt the sharp edge of existing systems in their own lives. Many of those people will not conform to the standard tech-bro avatar.

If we crush them at the level of expression, if we let harassment teach them that their very appearance is an unacceptable “bug”, we’ll never see what they were going to build.

So yes, this is about Daira. But it’s also about the next trans cryptographer who might decide to stay anonymous rather than face this. It’s about the non-binary founder who wonders whether coming out will tank fundraising. It’s about the closeted engineer at a surveillance-obsessed employer who could one day decide to join a privacy project, if they believed they’d be treated as a human being and not a meme template.

Protecting expression is not softness. It’s a strategy.

You don’t get resilient, antifragile systems if you punish the very people who are best placed to see their vulnerabilities.

Towards a different kind of witness

When I look back at that Zcash clip now, I try to see beyond the noise of the replies.

I see a human being who has given a large chunk of their life to building tools that most of us take for granted when we talk about “privacy.” I see someone who is both intensely technical and intensely vulnerable in public: visible as trans, visible as not fitting the corporate avatar mold, visible as themselves.

I also see a mirror.

In that mirror, I see my own lazy complicity: the times I’ve stayed quiet, the times I’ve reduced privacy to a talking point, the times I’ve lectured about “the future of freedom” without really interrogating who gets to feel free in our spaces.

Martyrs, in the old stories, reveal something about their persecutors. The way a society treats its witnesses says more about the society than the witness. Frankenstein’s monster, in the end, reveals more about human cruelty than about scientific hubris.

Daira’s situation reveals something about us.

We can shrug that off. We can tell ourselves it’s “just Twitter drama” and go back to talking about TPS and airdrops. Or we can let it challenge us, uncomfortably, to expand our sense of who belongs at the center of the canvas.

I don’t have a neat set of bullet-point solutions. I’m still learning, still reading, still trying to understand more about the cryptography that sits underneath the tokens and narratives I toss around in conversation. I’m also trying, in small awkward ways, to be quicker to speak up when I see the village reaching for torches.

But I do have one conviction that feels worth stating plainly:

Suppose this industry cannot make room for a trans cryptographer in a floral dress to talk about the privacy of thought without being torn apart. In that case, we do not deserve the words “freedom” and “decentralization” on our banners.

We will be another empire that loved its own mythology more than it loved its people.

I don’t want that to be our story.

So this is my small act of witness: to say that the way we treat each other, especially the strange, the marginal, the ones who don’t match our heroic self-image, is not cosmetic. It is central. It is protocol-level.

And maybe, if enough of us start saying that out loud, the next time a person like Daira steps into the light to talk about the space inside our heads, the crowd will be a little quieter, a little kinder, a little more willing to be confronted by a truth spoken from a body they didn’t expect.

Because in the end, privacy isn’t just about hiding. It’s about making room for thoughts, for selves, for futures that don’t yet have a category.

If we can’t make that room for each other, all our zero-knowledge proofs and perfectly transparent ledgers are just stained glass windows in a church that no longer believes.