Tue Oct 04, 2016 11:43 pm



https://www.linkedin.com/pub/anthony-kinsey/55/141/17a (

https://github.com/FFAxKenny (

Next up, we have "SomeoneWeird"

The last guy, "WangBus" Let's take a look at the guys behind Slickage. I found them through the github page. https://archive.is/P8cVg ) - This guy's only credentials are a bachelor's degree and a consultant position at "eWorldES," a Honolulu-based "enterprise solutions" firm that boasts such prestigious clients as The Honolulu Advertiser and Catholic Charities Honolulu. Remember guys, this guy gets paid $300k a year. https://archive.is/tCRxZ ) This guy, who is currently earning his bachelors degree at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. His personal website makes no mention of Slickage anywhere. I'm sure he writes great code for $300k a year, but I wonder why one of his most popular github repositories is of a Java implementation of the game Hangman.Next up, we have "SomeoneWeird" https://github.com/SomeoneWeird https://archive.is/dnueS ) He seems to have a bit more experience and more followers on Twitter, but still, no mention of Slickage anywhere.The last guy, "WangBus" https://github.com/wangbus https://archive.is/D3tEV ) actually does mention Slickage on his page, but nothing stands out to me to indicate that this guy is somehow a top-coder. Also lives in Manoa, Hawaii.

Slickage was recommended by Warren Togami, who has himself done important technical work for the forum and Bitcoin Core. I trust him. After talking to James, I was satisfied that Slickage would be able to do the job. There are many software development firms. I probably could have found one that's cheaper and better. But I don't have time to research this (I'm a full-time college student), I don't really know how to determine whether one firm is better than another anyway, and few trustworthy people were willing and/or able to help me find one. So I picked the first firm I found that was capable of doing the job well (after several years of looking).

What is the connection between Theymos and Blockstream?Theymos has hired an unknown developer firm, Slickage Studios, to build out a new forum software. Their monthly fee is $100,000 https://archive.is/npFQF ), for 4 full time developers. That's $25,000 USD per month, per developer. That would be a lot to ask for even the best developers in the world, but I should point out that Slickage is a group of four college kids at the University of Honolulu.Information on Slickage is scarce. Their website is just a landing page. They have no portfolio. Their twitter is scarce. I was only able to easily confirm two employees:1. James Wang, CEO (github:wangbus)2. Julie Sakuda, CTOTheymos claims he has hired "four highly skilled developers" ( link )( https://archive.is/K3nFq ). But attempting to find any info on them is difficult indeed. In that reddit thread: https://archive.is/wr7vI ):While looking through some of Slickage's code on github, I found this: https://github.com/slickage/baron/blob/ ... travis.yml A Google search of Warren@slickage.com reveals that this person is Warren Togami. He has been using the warren@slickage.com email address at least since 2014 on various Linux mailing lists.A Blockstream blog post http://imgur.com/BWdjdlk ) dated May 27th, 2015, announces the hiring of Warren Togami as Technical Project Manager.According to Warren's github page ( https://github.com/wtogami ), he has been making contributions to ElementsProject since May 2013, and Slickage since March 2014. I also note that as of September 2016, Warren is still contributing to Slickage projects on Github, which would seem to indicate that he is still involved with them despite his other employment at Blockstream.Warren was also on the planning committees of both ScalingBitcoin Montreal and ScalingBitcoin HongKong.Will either Theymos, Warren, or Blockstream clarify the nature of the relationship that clearly exists here?