Every few months a headline announces that blockchain is about to unlock a two-trillion-dollar market.

I've been reading those since 2017.

Here's what I've actually seen change for a small business in that time: nothing that required them to understand blockchain.

What did change was underneath — payment providers settling faster, some documents becoming verifiable without a notary, a few supply-chain records that can't be quietly edited. All of it arrived as a normal button in normal software.

That's the pattern with most infrastructure. If it works, you don't get to be impressed by it. You just stop having a problem you used to have.

Worth remembering the next time a technology needs you to be excited about it before it needs you to use it.