If you have a LinkedIn profile (that is sufficiently filled in), you probably receive more or less connection requests. Most are from headhunters, some from old colleagues or friends. Some professions might receive more interest than others. Can you guess what profession (well, better call it keyword) received shitload of interest?

Yep, you guessed right. It's "blockchain" (and probably "cryptocurrency", "bitcoin"). Here's what happens, when you add it to your LinkedIn profile:

Basically, my inbox is flooded with requests from strangers to add them to my network. All offer something related to blockchain or cryptocurrencies. Mostly ICOs.

What does this mean?

In the short-term - it's probably best to be very careful who you accept on LinkedIn. Looks like LinkedIn is used by many ICOs (most of which are either scam or not going to make it) to get more people into the pre-sale or crowdsale. In many (most) cases, I would recommend to stay away or to really do your research about these ICOs. Google the person's name, the company, check their website for obvious flaws (like footer links - are they working?, do they have some T&Cs? A good about us and contact page? A good product and thorough whitepaper? There's just too many for all of them to succeed - there's not enough demand for so many services these would cover, they'll run out of cash, the team will fall apart (crypto teams are quite prone to split up, create forks etc).

There's an ICO noise around currently that needs to settle first. Many will burn, regulations will kick in and then the real companies that really want to and have the brains, balls and knowledge, will succeed. Maybe 2018 is the year when we'll see all this unfold.

In the long-term - blockchain or alternative crypto technology will create new jobs, professions and markets in a similar way that the internet did. Twenty years ago, we didn't dream about how big a search engine can become, how massive a simple bookstore online can become or that a third of the world's population will plaster their life all over some social network.

We can't really think of that many big uses of the blockchain or similar technologies. We are still only fiddling with it, but in the coming years, more and more programmers, companies and consumers will come up with ideas on how to implement this technology into our lives. And by growing number of services and types of use for blockchain, there will be a growing demand for people who know their way around this technology. In a similar manner as there is demand for web designers today. When internet has started, no one had a website and companies didn't see the point of it - until Google changed all of that.

Once a company (maybe an ICO?) will disrupt this segment in a similar fashion, we'll see a growing demand for blockchain programmers, developers, consultants etc.

Guess I'll respond to more LinkedIn requests then!

What can you do?

Educate yourself about blockchain and its potential uses, programming languages, think about ways that you can become indispensable and the go-to person for blockchain related issues.

Good luck! What jobs do you think will be created by blockchain and related technology?