An etherium hackathon held February 16-18, 2018 at The Sports Castle in Denver website 
There was gold in them thar hills and a city grew up provisioning prospectors and speculators of every size and shape. The city expanded further by building Union Station to connect to the nation-wide railway system. The Seal of Colorado features axe, hammer, and pick.
This isn't our first gold rush, nor land rush, oil boom or bust. We have some practice picking ourselves up by our bootstraps.
I didn't get my act together soon enough to participate in the hacking. But I have soaked up some new vocabulary and gotten a sense of the kinds of things people are building.
When electric motors were first introduced, people tried to build them big like the steam engines they already knew. But steam engines were much better for big jobs than similarly sized electric motors. What changed the world was many tiny electric motors.
Many conversations seem still too much like the money we already know, or the financial assets we already know. Competing directly with fiat currency instead of filling niches that are un-served by what we already know.
That said, the prize winners of the hackathon all seem noteworthy:
* Elkrem - etherium development board: connect sensors and actuators to etherium smart contracts for IoT & Smart Cities things
* Cache - dystopian 8bit graphics cyberpunk trading game: remember playing drugwars on TI graphing calculator? In-game tokens cross-over to on etherium blockchain
* Feel Good - blood donation supply chain tracking on blockchain with QR codes too.
* KeySplit - shard you key passphrase, distribute to trusted friends and guardians, recover the passphrase with 3 of 5 shards
* profiler - performance profile where your solidity contracts are spending your gas
* canteen - devops orchestration on blockchain because kubernetes is too centralized.
* blockstreet - tutorial and coding environment all the way to deploy tool