[davidajackson]

It is a viable career--just make it one of the skills that you have. You can start with Solidity and program some basic smart contracts (check out https://remix.ethereum.org/). Then when you feel like you're getting the hang of it, try creating a server that listens for blockchain events and manages a DB of off chain activity... and then you can start architecting more complex systems, like contracts that interact with each other.

Speaking from a financial standpoint I think ETH will be more of a career for you if that's what you pursue--you can charge well for smart contract architecture. I think BTC will be more of a store of value (and then transactional too later on) and ETH will be computational/contractual. Lots of people have strong opinions on this and other decentralized scripting languages; this is just my opinion as a random guy on the internet :)

Speaking from a code efficiency standpoint: Solidity will force you to be very economical about the code that you write, since you pay per opcode to execute code. I think that alone is worth writing some smart contracts, because it forces you (as long as you set cost as a constraint) to be efficient in your architecture so it's a good exercise.

There aren't a ton of real world applications where you can honestly say "that architecture is better than a centralized one" yet. But if you study the tech and grow with it over the next 20 years you will have a complete understanding of how it works and will be in a position to contribute as it gets to higher adoption levels (or help push it there), which I consider a good idea.