ARTS AND CULTURE
Cem Bağdatlıoğlu got his PhD in Nuclear Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin and has focused on business intelligence and analytics in the initial stages of his career. His first book, a science-fiction novel, Saabu (Akıl Fikir Yayınları), is the first book on the blockchain.
The novel was recently published, although he started writing it some years ago: “I had begun writing Saabu in 2012 when I was starting on my PhD work. By the time it was 2014, my workload had really ramped up, but the book wasn't nearly ready. That is when I anchored Saabu on the bitcoin blockchain. This anchoring means that by having a copy of the specific PDF file of the book and knowing where to look on the bitcoin blockchain, one can prove that the file had existed in 2014. In the beginning of the pandemic, my mom, Dilek Ataman Bağdatlıoglu RC 76, offered to translate the book to Turkish. This proposal re-kindled my efforts to finish it fully after making notes on it for nearly a decade. The book is from the perspective of someone who has been taken by an advanced and altruistic human civilization. In Saabu, one of my overarching goals was to describe an optimistic future.” Saabu seems to promise a lot especially to those readers interested in concepts like equality, the paradox of equality, production, management, and technology.
Bağdatlıoğlu is Chief of Staff and Head of Analytics at the recently launched company Onuu ("on you”) where low-income people can access banking, insurance, and financial products. Bağdatlıoğlu’s futuristic perspective is prominent in this venture: “We are looking at several ways to innovate and incorporate bitcoin, NFT's, and crypto products into our product.”
Published July 2022
