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When I first heard the term blockchain, I had no idea what it meant, what it was, or who might be involved. It sounded like a wild and pugnacious black cat was strolling into my home office to haunt me and make me feel bad about my intellectual capacity.

Nevertheless, I had to deal with blockchain because when you're in the tech industry, you must understand all new tech things before you can do anything with them such as write blogs. I couldn't chuck it out the basement window like an old flat tire or something random and useless like that.

Like a black cat, blockchain had begun to torment me, forcing me to grapple with a new, abstract and intensely cerebral technological phenomenon.

All I really wanted to know about blockchain was whether I could make serious cash using it. Money makes the world function. Had that been the case, I could have hoarded and ingested a Winnebago full of Lucky Charms. This breakfast cereal tastes better than any other food except maybe homemade lasagna depending on who cooks it.

My first imaginations of what blockchain could be were of cinderblocks on a construction site laced with chains like the ones you see on the back of AAA trucks. You know, when the guy hooks up your car and tows it to the local gas station because your tire is flat or your red engine light is on for probably no good reason at all and you end up paying $900 for them to fix it. But you never get clear what they fixed and what else they said was screwed up with your car.

"Yeah, your belt hook is old and frayed," says the cryptic mechanic (they're all cryptic). "And your carburetor is leaking like a sieve. And, oh by the way, your car overall is a hunk of junk. You should get a new one. Aren't you embarrassed riding around in that thing?"

Blockchain. Hmmm. Sounds odd and ominous and probably some other words that begin with the letter "O" -odious? orthogonal? Blockchain sounded like something I didn't want to get too close to. It was that feeling you get standing next to a pool in the Northeast in late May when you know it's freezing in there but you have to dive in anyway and feel the pain because you have to survive.

Feeling uncomfortable, I went to the Internet and watched a video by futurist Don Tapscott in which he opened by saying blockchain would be the biggest technology breakthrough since the internet.

That got my attention. Ain't no fad this here internet. The internet is getting to be important.

I watched the video and noticed all sorts of curly and swirling visuals of things latched together. It reminded me of a Disney movie when characters float around in the water sort of like in the box office classics The Little Mermaid and Finding Nemo. The blocks were kind of like sharks darting around going to eat the whale.

Poor whale. Sharks always spear them, then eat them. What a way to die. One day you're big and powerful and strutting around the ocean like you're the big man around the deep-sea campus of creepy characters.

The next day a shark's razor-blade teeth slice through your abdomen. Blood spews out of you like out of Tony Montana in the final gun scene in Scarface. The shark rummages inside you belly and starts chewing your innards like it's just another day at the lunch table.

Let's bring this into your kitchen. This would be like you standing in your kitchen and a tiger the size of the one in Hangover comes in and takes a bite out of your stomach. You bleed to death on the floor as the tiger continues to chew on your insides. Bad situation.

Tapscott didn't talk about whales, sharks or tigers. The weird things flying around on the screen looked more like minnows in size. But the same concept applies: Indiscernible objects floating and flying around on some sort of connected string or chain.

This image reminded me of the images on the board game Chutes and Ladders. The contraption on the video holding everything together looked like a ladder like the one people climb on when their house gets flooded up to the second floor and they're being rescued from their roof by two men from FEMA.

The idea Tapscott kept harping on was that things get attached to each other. It made me thing of sticking the ends of band aides to each other underwater, and some ladder things flying around as if it needed to be adjusted to put out a forest fire blazing all around the ladder.

People were nowhere to be found in this video. This made it hard to understand why anyone would care about blockchain. Ladders, band aides, sharks, whales and tigers are inanimate, unfeeling objects. They lack soul. They don't emotionally connect with humans on a visceral, psychological or thermodynamic level. So, I was having trouble resonating with how this blockchain thing could be as important as the internet.

Maybe I could have connected the dots had the video depicted three or four firemen on the ladder even if they weren't putting out a fire and just hanging out on the ladders watching YouTube videos on their smartphones. That would have made me feel more emotional about the video.

Tapscott threw out all sorts of spellbinding statistics about blockchain. His thrust was that something like 10 billion people would be connected to the blockchain in five years.

And 20 billion pieces of data would be stamped onto the blockchain like a stamp on an envelope. Zero people could do anything to stop this from happening. And 10 billion people would one day be connected to the blockchain whether they wanted to be or not.

It wasn't clear from the video how much money I could make if I joined the blockchain. I wanted to know if I signed up for the blockchain whether I could go to the blockchain and take $10 million out of someone else's bank account and live happily ever after on a beach.

Then I would have really cared about blockchain. Everything else Tapscott said that didn't involve me stashing bank was technological hype and nebulous noise.

Underwhelmed by the video and no surer of what blockchain was than what goes on in the mind of an octopus, I came to this conclusion: Blockchain is insane. And after we all get consumed by it, life would never be the same.

Who is to blame?

- Charles Hartley

Charles Hartley is the president of Carolina Content & Media Relations Corporation based in Davidson, North Carolina. The company improves the quality of writing, content marketing and media relations for high-tech businesses. He writes a tech humor blog, Tech Tales From the Hart.