The first *long* review of my book, 24 from a non-bitcoiner š„¹
In my opinion, this book is our āMatrixā for the 2020ās era. I could easily see it becoming a movie for the current generation. In the original movie the matrix was a 3-D world created by a computer program, in this book the Matrix is the financial system we are all used to, based on nothing and beneficial mainly to those at the top of the money food chain.
The book opens as Oliver Battolo, a 23 year old with a Masters Degree in Computer Science living in New York City, is experiencing a frightening dream. In the dream he is surrounded by blackness. A distant voice in German states āAnd now you are almost ready to understand the true meaning.ā But Oliver does not understand German. Again, the voice he now recognizes as a woman friend of his late father, urges āYour time has come.ā But Oliver does not understand and cries out for help. The dream fades. And so begins the story of 24.
We next see Oliver at a memorial service for his father who was lost at sea under mysterious circumstances just three weeks prior. Oliver is in shock, so much so that he is not even able to speak at the service and for all intents and purposes he appears to be drowning in his own sea of grief. Interestingly, the book is divided into five sections: Disbelief, Entropy, Anger, Uncertainty and Acceptance, closely matching the now familiar 5 stages of grief outlined by Elizabeth Kubler Ross: Denial, Bargaining, Anger, Depression and Acceptance.
After the memorial service the woman, whose voice he heard in the dream, comes up to him and tells him that he much visit her so that she can tell him something her father wants him to know. He does and learns that his father wanted him to learn from her a mystical technique for ātime projectionā that he himself had practiced. After initially rejecting the idea he eventually agrees and the next day in a session with the woman he sees a room with a television displaying a video of his father. In the video his father tells him that there āare twenty four words he needs to find.ā How do I find them? asks Oliver. āThis is how. Doing just what youāre doing right now. One word at a time.ā
And so begins Oliverās quest for the 24 words. There are 24 chapters in the book, the title of each chapter is the word that is found and I found it kind of fun to see how the author would work each word into the chapter. Eventually we find that the 24 words are the codewords needed to open a fortune in BitCoin and although I had of course heard of Bitcoin, I knew absolutely nothing about it or that there was any kind of a philosophy associated with it. Each of the code words must come from a library of accepted codewords, 2048 in total, that were approved in the year 2013. It was interesting learning about some of the history of Bitcoin and I even found myself doing so of my own research into the subject out of curiosity. One tidbit that I uncovered is that the main developer of Bitcoin, Santoshi Nakamoto, may for may not actually exist. He, or someone claiming to be him, created and deployed the original reference implementation and developed the first Blockchain database, then disappeared off the face of the earth. If you look him up in Wikipedia you can learn about all the people that are thought to be him.
But 24 is not just a book about money. Along the way we learn about Oliverās fatherās early days in India where he was a genius computer programmer and how he came to America. We get to see Oliver grow as a person, find love, become an art thief (for good reason) and learn some of the secrets of the Universe. There is a character named The Nose Smiter that keeps showing up during Oliverās Time Projection experiences to offer advice and keep him of the path. Like his own personal Yoda, he teaches Oliver that āwhen he jumps a net will appear,ā that life is āhappening FOR him, not TO himā and that he is a ācreator within his own creation.ā
All in all, I found 24 to be a very enjoyable book and full of interesting information. When I decided that I was going to write a review of the book I realized that to do it justice I would need to re-read it and take some notes so that I could keep my facts straight. I ended up with over 30 pages of handwritten notes! Iām so glad I read the book a second time because I think a lot of stuff went right over my head on the first time through.
