When Thousands Filled a Hilton Ballroom to Ponder the Future of Bitcoin

NEW YORK — Seth Kaye has hot pink hair and Pokémon stuffed animals on his shoulder. He mines Litecoin, a cryptocurrency. He’s a designer. And he is trying to start a solar farm in Washington, where he lives.

Kaye was one of the more than 8,400 people in New York last week for Consensus 2018, a blockchain-themed conference where people pitched ideas, mingled and reveled in the possibility of disrupting health care or real estate or how government works.

While Consensus attracted many people like Kaye, the gathering, which was held at Hilton in midtown Manhattan, had all the typical trappings of a modern American business conference: hotel-catered lunch wraps, networking mixers and schwag. One needed to only look at some of the event’s exhibitors, like Deloitte, Microsoft, KPMG and IBM, to recognize that blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies like bitcoin — once the province of a small group of outsiders — had entered the mainstream.