What if I were to told you there was a book that predicted the coming of the era of digital currency a decade before even the first paper on bitcoin ever emerged. There was a book that came in 1999 whose name itself was a tribute to ‘necronomicon’ a book from the world of Hp lovecraft.
The first time I came across the word Cryptonomicon was a decade back; it was a time when cryptocurrency had not faded away from public vogue, a time when privacy was still not a myth after the Snowden leaks. So, the allure of a Data Haven powered by cryptocurrency backed by world war 2 era gold aroused my curiosity.
I consider myself a reader, but if the books on my shelf could speak, they would call me a hoarder rather than a reader. But in my defense, I tried to read Cryptonomicon a day after the copy came from Amazon.
But after a few pages, the allure faded, boredom seeped in, and the dust settled. Over the years, I came across the book’s mention in interviews from tech moguls who used to mention the book in the same breadth as The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings.
By that time, I had surrendered my hope of ever being an engineer and moved to the lesser world of business studies during my CAT preparations. I was confident that most of my reading comprehensions could never match up to the verbal behemoth that I came across in the writings of Neal Stephenson.
After a decade, I wanted to cross some of the things off my bucket list, and that’s how I again decided to have my second innings with Cryptonomicon.
Published in 1999 by tech evangelist Neal Stephenson, the novel was a sensational hit among nerds and geeks across the world; this was the Bible equivalent for geeks, as the book prophesied many of the technologies we are enjoying nowadays.
There was even a rumor that one of the unspoken conditions for joining the PayPal Mafia (a group consisting of early founders of PayPal like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Steve Chen, etc., who later went on to found firms that come to dominate the world like Tesla and YouTube), was that you must have read Cryptonomicon.
The book takes place across two timelines with a span of 50 years in between. The novel covers on one spectrum topics like code breaking, espionage, and the earlier inception of digital computers, and on the other spectrum, it discusses themes of Data Havens, hacking, and cryptocurrencies.
The book shifts between timelines, and each chapter takes place from a character’s point of view, and the story keeps shifting between the characters and timelines from chapter to chapter.
It begins with Sgt. Robert “Bobby” Shaftoe, a haiku-writing Marine who was posted in the Philippines. He was leading a peaceful life, or as peaceful as it could be in the early days of World War II. His days were spent between fistfights with Japanese soldiers and hanging out with his fiancée Glory Altamira, a nursing student of Filipino descent.
Next, we are introduced to Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse, a mathematician who was a peer of Alan Turing, the father of digital computers. However, after the war started, he tried to enlist in the army.
But because of his poor physical condition, he ended up in the Navy band.
Then the war started, and Bobby was drafted to travel across the world to kill the Japs, and Waterhouse was pulled from the band to the cryptographic school when his mathematical background came of use.
.During the war, each nation had a trump card which they heavily relied on. For the Japanese, it was the torpedo, and for the Nazis, it was the Enigma. The Enigma was a machine that was used to encode transmissions—an electro-mechanical scrambler.
It took a letter we typed and, using a series of variable components, lit up a different letter.
The Enigma was not breakable, and it gave the Germans an unfair advantage; the Allies couldn’t predict when and where they might attack or appear.
At this time, by exploiting a fatal flaw due to its reflector, Enigma could never encrypt a letter as itself. So, an ‘A’ could never be encrypted as an ‘A’, ‘B’ could never be ‘B’, and so on.
The codebreakers would make educated guesses of words that were likely in the message. These were called “cribs.” For example, they knew that most German messages included a weather report, so they would guess the word Wetter (German for “weather”) was in the text.
But if the Allies started to act upon the information, it would be clear to the Nazis that the code was broken, and they would patch it up, so the Allies came up with the idea of Detachment 2702.
A team under Waterhouse would create a proxy story behind the intercept; like if there was information on a fleet attack in the South China Sea, they might send a scout flight to create an impression it was detected during the reconnaissance rather than a decoded transmission.
Then the story shifts to Randy Lawrence Waterhouse, the eldest grandson of Waterhouse, an accomplished network engineer who is trying to establish a Data Haven and a new form of cryptocurrency in the fictional city of Kinakuta in Southeast Asia.
Randy, along with his partner Avi, a lover of RPGs, wants to establish a tech haven that is free from the hands of authority. They both have a mistrust towards authority and want to establish a Swiss bank for data with its own digital currency backed by lost gold from the World War II era.
It is at this time that they meet Doug Shaftoe and his daughter Amy. Doug is the son of Bobby Shaftoe, and they run a diving company that is tasked with scouting the sea for the laying of underwater cables, who, like most Americans with a military background, were on the lookout for the lost gold from the World War II era.
Randy along with his partner Avi a lover of RPG’s wants to establish a tech haven that is free from the hands of authority, they both had a mistrust towards authority and wants to establish a swiss bank for data with its own digital currency backed by lost gold from the world war 2 era.
It is at this time that they meet Dough shaftoe and his daughter Amy, dough is the son of Bobby shaftoe and they run a diving company that is tasked with scouting the sea for the laying of underwater cables, who like most americans with military backgroudn were on the lookout for the lost gold from the world war 2 era.
Goto Dengo is the man who managed to make structural engineering still seem sexy in a book about hackers, spies, and code breakers.
Goto was a Nipponese soldier who used to have sparring matches with Bobby before the war started. Then later on, the war took him around the world, and post his shipwreck, he literally lived Tom Hanks’s life from Cast Away on a cannibal island.
But after his return to the world of the living in the last days of the war, he is given a task by the emperor which requires his extensive civil engineering skills that will forever change the course of the entire story.
The rest of the plot involves how the gold ended up in the Philippines as part of the Japanese efforts to pile up the looted gold in one location as they couldn’t take it back to their land.
And Goto was tasked with building a complex system to store the gold through a chain of complex tunnels.
The rest of the book will be about Randy battling a dentist-turned-venture capitalist coming after his Data Haven to uncovering the lost gold buried, which may be his last hope to save their venture from collapsing.
