The streets of Dublin, once a canvas of the mundane, now stretched out like a cryptographic puzzle before Stephen. The grey buildings echoed the binary codes — 0s and 1s — of his cherished Bitcoin. Every step he took, every murmur he heard, seemed to oscillate between the intangible and the concrete.

Leaning against a lamppost, Stephen pulled out a tiny metallic ledger. Its contents? A series of 24 words. A mnemonic. A bridge to his digital fortune. He murmured them, their weight far more than the ephemeral air carrying them.

“Bloomsday,” he mused, a nod to the city’s most famed wanderer, but his own journey had taken him not through human hearts but cryptographic hashes. Pubs transformed into nodes, and the River Liffey’s ripples mirrored blockchain waves.

In the haze of the evening, at Davy Byrne's pub, he sipped his burgundy, letting the taste play upon his lips just as he played upon the idea of decentralization. The faint hum of conversation around him was no different from the consensus protocols of his beloved network. Every voice striving for validation, every chuckle an echo of confirmation.

Nora, a familiar yet distant silhouette, sauntered in. Their conversations once filled with flirtations, now found themselves entangled in the esoteric realms of digital gold. "Still dreaming in codes, are we?" she teased, her voice dripping with a playful sarcasm.

"Always," he replied cryptically, swirling the wine in his glass, as if trying to see the universe within its deep red confines. "In a world dictated by order, I find solace in the chaotic beauty of algorithms."

She shook her head, strands of her dark hair dancing like the unpredictable price lines of Bitcoin. "To the untrained eye, it's just a drink, Stephen, not a metaphor."

But that was the crux of it all. Everything around Stephen was a metaphor. The gritty Dublin streets, the conversations, even his own self — all were nodes, interconnected in the vast, perplexing blockchain of existence.

The night wore on. Pints were downed, songs sung, but Stephen remained entrapped in his web of thoughts, trying to sync his internal ledger with the external world, block by cryptic block.

And as the first rays of dawn broke, Dublin, with its intertwined tales of Joyce and now, Bitcoin, lay before Stephen as an open book — a ledger, waiting to be written, confirmed, and immortalized.