Blockchain is finding more and more widespread adoption in many companies and industries should not miss their opportunity to join this trend. If you are interested in being one of the early adopters, John, my imaginary friend who successfully founded his own company that develops supply blockchains that track the food you buy all the way from production to Target stores, will tell you about his journey. He will also give you multiple reasons why you should start now:

1. People seem to trustfully give their money "blockchain" companies

Image source: https://www.theatlas.com/charts/rJWric7Ez

This image shows the stock of a firm formerly known as Tulip BioMed, now operating under the name Bitcoin Services. See a correlation? The stock increased by mere 42,500% in one year after the name change. And this is no exception. There have been numerous occasions where companies "adjusted" their name and as a consequence had their stock prices skyrocket.

Some of you might wonder, why this is happening all over the place. And while I can only assume possible reasons, the one that seems most logical to me is the fact that cryptocurrency's value for now is purely speculative. But wait a second? We were talking about blockchains and not cryptocurrency.
While this is true, these two obviously have a lot in common which is enough for most people to use them as synonyms. So if they hear either one, they instantly get the feeling of security, transparency and control. Once crypto assets become more mature, they will also be less volatile and their intrinsic value will be based on their usefulness and usability.

Another reason could be the believe that such companies could be the new Google. While I agree that this could happen at some point, for now it is more of a gold rush mentality. Everyone wants to invest into crypto and after finding a new company that seems to make profit with blockchains, people think they found the holy grail. I am in no way discouraging anyone to do so here, but I strongly advise to do your due diligence before you invest.

John read about that trend early on, so he considered it closely when choosing the companies name. His company is called "The Curious Buyer's Blockchain Inc" and while his friends told him that the name sounds rather stupid, it has indeed worked wonders for him. He had a couple of investors call him because they were very intrigued by his idea and wanted to know more about it.

2. Your customers will at some point consist of more than 90% millennials

Image source: https://fee.org/media/17588/millennials_devices.jp
Especially for people that may now be at the mid of their life, millennials seem like a strange generation. But companies should keep in mind that at some point all of their customers will be millennials. As a consequence they will all value the same and simple principles: transparency and decentralization.
Our generation does not trust big companies or the government. They are often accused of mass manipulation or exploiting the poor. While I am not going to touch on that further, blockchains offer the perfect solution to that. By eliminating the middle man, they eliminate said problem. So you might as well start converting your business to use blockchain now.

But be careful, do not force your business practices into using blockchains. I repeat, do not try to force anything. If you are a seasoned wood worker producing handmade cabinets, you might not be able to harness all the possibilities of blockchain to their full potential. And trust me, the young generation smells those forced adaptions from miles. If they do not see a whitepaper, your code is not open source or you do not provide enough information on your implementation, trust me, you will not have much success. While by far not all of the people understand every detail of a whitepaper, there are always ones that do and they will spread that information. As we all know, twitter takes next to no time to spread a topic among millions of users.

John, being the smart dude that he is, took all these points into consideration. When coming up with the idea behind is company, he already knew that he would be focusing on supply chains and also exactly knew how to do it and how to implement it. Therefore he did not have to change any previous business practices. He also took great care to document everything, upload the code on github in order to make it open source and contacted a lawyer to do the paperwork and write the whitepaper. John obviously knows what the millennials want.

3. It is a good way to offload some computational costs

Image source. Getty Images/iStockphoto
This point will not be apparent to everyone right now. But to explain, imagine the following example. John managed to acquire some capital to start his company. Beta phase went great and he is on a good way to launch. But costs for hosted servers are racking up quickly and they are killing his profits. And no one likes low profits.
Blockchain to the rescue. I am just going to simplify everything a bit, so bare with me for a second. All the costs John faces for hosting a database and frontend server can be eliminated by running everything on a blockchain. By not having to run chains privately, he can just run a smart contract on the ethereum blockchain and host his webpage on IPFS, the interplanetary file system. Sounds great right? And it is! Everyone can do and it is indeed very low cost.
In our case, John could even get away with just paying initial fees for his smart contract since every contract call will only be a read (except the people that add products to the chain, but that it another story) which are free.

But don't get too hyped now, this only applies to very small user bases. I feel like people consider the blockchain to be some kind of decentralized supercomputer everyone has access to. According to Vitalik Buterin, Ethereums chain has the computing power of a phone from the 1990's which is not a lot. Golem tried to combat that problem and I really support their project, but they are hitting the boundaries of Physics. They can only parallelize tasks that do not require inter-process-communication. CGI rendering can split up videos into multiple small subtasks that can easily be split to saturate many hosts. But other multiprocessing tasks would require machine-level communication. And todays TCP-connections are just too slow to do that. Waaaaaaayyyyy tooooooo sloooowww.

Blockchain is a transmission protocol for secure data. And people should start to treat it like one. It is great at synchronizing or tracking stuff, it excels at doing secure transactions of any sort or even keeping track of assets or identities. But it is not a sort of decentralized web hosting solution to safe some money. If you have to satisfy bigger user bases, consider using hybrid setups. This is in my opinion the solution that will succeed in the long run. Your backend like databases and time-critical services will remain hosted on dedicated systems. But the intercommunication between backend and user will be directed by a blockchain. Therefore you do not face speed penalties and can still enjoy the advantages of blockchain. I will not give any general advise here since it would just not be possible. There are countless possible implementations and every case should be considered on its own and evaluated carefully.

4. Conclusion

If you made it to this point, I am glad you read that far and found it interesting. John will now recap for you what you have to watch out for when adopting blockchain in your business:

1. Carefully choose the name and considere recent trends
2. Prepare a whitepaper, document everything well and make sure blockchain technology fits your business
3. Make sure your infrastructure fits the service you offer and always check if you are properly using blockchain technology.
4. Have fun and enjoy the journey
   You will surely learn a ton of stuff and it is all very interesting and new. So enjoy your way and you might just find yourself being the next big player in the crypto world.