Not to post myself to this postdoc (I don't have a doctorate to start with...) but I encourage anybody to embrace this.
I'm a Bitcoin user since two years, and since a year or so I'm getting into Bitcoin and learning about Blockchain related technologies, it's fascinating, and since I discovered Smalltalk ~15 years ago I haven't felt so excited about a "new" technology" like this. In fact this this year I won't be attending Smalltalks 2016 and instead I'll go to the LaBITConf (
http://www.labitconf.com/).
Related with the post I can say the number of Blockchain/Bitcoin academic papers published every year is growing really fast.
Regards,