Almost 30 people joined us in the air-conditioned surroundings of Newry’s latest co-working space: Flexiwork.space
Garrett of Flexiwork.space welcomed the audience with pizza, beer and soft drinks into the cool surroundings of a space that is sure to attract freelancers and home workers who want to mingle with other creatives.
The theme for the evening meetup was blockchain and the main speaker was Eamonn Hynes who has been working with blockchain technologies for several years and writes articles on Ethereum. Eamonn briefly described the evolution of Distributed Ledger Technologies including BitCoin, Ethereum and the more recent developments of HashGraph.
Eamonn demonstrated value transfers between ethereum accounts on a test network on his own laptop using the geth command-line tool and proceeded to do a live demonstration of creating a smart contract. Using the Solidity language Eamonn compiled the sol file using gethc to produce byte code to live on the ethereum blockchain. He was then able to demonstrate executing that smart contract with funds moved between a ‘buyer’ and ‘seller’.
Local accountant Adrian Markey then spoke for 15 minutes on taxation issues related to crypto-currencies drawing many questions from the audience about HMRC procedures, VAT and capital gains.
Last up to the podium was Brian Cleland who described the data analysis involved in the Midas EU project that uses published open data to analyse patterns of depression and anti-depressant prescriptions in this jurisdiction. The comparisons between other regions of the UK are stark with prescriptions of anti-depressants much higher here and although this is sometimes attributed to the legacy of the ‘troubles’ more research is needed.
We would love to welcome all of our speakers back to delve deeper and I personally would love to hear more from Eamonn about Hashgraph after the project goes live and some more time to examine Python for data analytics by Brian would be interesting.
