I bent down, rested my knees on a prayer cushion, and began typing into a small computer. In front of me were dozens of candles, flowers, Japanese lucky cat figurines, and several wallet-sized picture frames. They held photos of Vitalik Buterin, the Canadian programmer who cofounded the computing platform Ethereum, as well as of Dorian Nakamoto, a man in his 60s with the same last name as the founder of Bitcoin. He was misidentified as its creator by Newsweek in 2014; because no one knows what the actual Satoshi Nakamoto looks like, the California man's image has continued to serve as a stand-in.

At the altar, a message on a small computer screen prompted visitors to write prayers to the real Nakamoto, which were then algorithmically transformed into random private keys, which were in turn used to guess the password that unlocks the Bitcoin inventor's abandoned cryptocurrency fortune—estimated to be worth over $8 billion. I entered in a halfhearted prayer, waited a few beats, and was greeted with a message: "I'm sorry my child. You are not the chosen one. Have more faith in the HODL. Spread the good word of decentralization."

The artist collective Vapor Ants conceived of the shrine as a commentary on the near-religious fervor that devotees have for blockchain technology, which they believe will transform the internet and global economy. The interactive art piece was displayed at the Ethereal Summit, a two-day conference hosted at Brooklyn's Knockdown Center by ConsenSys, one of the most prominent companies betting that blockchain tech, and Ethereum specifically, will disrupt nearly every industry imaginable. Ethereum differs from Bitcoin in that it allows for a variety of applications—and even other cryptocurrencies—to be built on top of it, like how apps are built on top of the World Wide Web. ConsenSys plans for a future where Ethereum-based apps eclipse the web as we know it, creating what it calls Web 3.0.

The two-day, $1200-a-person conference was hosted at an art and performance space in Queens, and served as the start of New York's blockchain week, which includes a series of other events—including a conference confusingly called Consensus, hosted by the publication CoinDesk. Attendees included plenty of young men in their 20s and 30s, but also lots of women, and a fair number of people who looked to be retirement age. Think of Ethereal as Google I/O or Microsoft Build, which both also took place last week, but for Ethereum.

'This is either the biggest scam or the most undervalued asset in humanity. It could still be either way.' Ronny Chieng, The Daily Show

To strain the analogy a bit, it also helps to think of ConsenSys as the Google of blockchain tech. The company has its hands in nearly every aspect of the Ethereum landscape, the same way the tech giant dominates most facets of the digital economy. ConsenSys has nearly 1000 official employees, some of whom work on projects related to supply chains, real estate, music, journalism, and other industries. But the heart of its business is in developing foundational blockchain tools, which can then be utilized by other companies, like how Google developed Gmail, Google Drive, and Google Cloud. So far, Consensys' offerings include uPort, a tool for managing user identity, as well as Truffle, an Ethereum development framework, and more.

The company was founded in 2015 by Joseph Lubin, a Canadian entrepreneur and a cofounder of Ethereum. His net worth is estimated to be over $1 billion, amassed from investing in ether, Ethereum's cryptocurrency, before it gained traction. Lubin's personal fortune helps to bankroll the company's ventures.

Perhaps befitting of its name, Ethereal hosted mostly vague talks, including several that might leave blockchain skeptics unconvinced. The tech's great promise is that it will decentralize the internet, putting power back into the hands of the people. When you transact with a traditional bank, it's in charge of keeping track of who you send money to and when. But with blockchains, that information is verified and stored by everyone on the network, stripping institutions like banks of their historical power. That's why no single person controls Bitcoin, and it's not regulated by an entity like the Federal Reserve. Sometimes, though, it's unclear how that tech applies to many of the things blockchain believers say it can disrupt. Or how it can improve on the status quo.