Please note the very extensive paragraph I added to my prior comment about the economic non-viability of Skywire.

The Skywire hardware appears to me to be an attempt to side-step ICO regulation by selling a $600 device for $10,000, then rebating SKY tokens. The SEC and the Howey test will look past any such obfuscations to the underlying economic reality of the securitization by an entity which the investors are relying on for their expectation-of-profit instead of the free market being predominantly in control. Ethereum transitioned to non-security because the free market is now more dominant than Vitalik. But had Vitalik not lawyered up in Switzerland, the issuers could still have been liable for selling unregistered securities to US persons.

Now have all this strange activity which could be construed to be market manipulation.

I think perhaps there’s some value in the consensus work they were doing but it’s incomplete and they have only words claiming something more complete.

Also watching on the linked Youtube, Synth hang out in Puerto Rico with the other talking heads of dubious repute such as Max Keiser (and Brock Pierce with his Goldman slime are there also), doesn’t add to my confidence that he is focused on development and coding.

Although there is code and coding on the Github, none of the actual coders’ identities are known.

So although I would like to work with qualified developers and do great work, I’m very wary of all the hype, lack of transparency, and the legality hole they have dug for themselves by ostensibly selling SKY tokens to US persons.

If I’m able to communicate with Synth, I am going to ask tough questions which I don’t think he is going to want to answer. Yet I’m also having thoughts that I should probably stay as far away from them as I can. This was the same opinion I had in 2015 when I was analyzing their bitcointalk.org thread and they were constantly going on and on about all this hyped nonsense about hardware and Skywire and weren’t actually presenting a viable consensus algorithm. Appears to me they may have funded some Chinese PhDs to create a consensus algorithm paper which has some merit, but there’s nothing published since then of great merit. The Skywire hype is really worthless.

I’m reasonably capable of appraising the personalities of people when I see them in video or live in person. Synth seems to be a reasonably smart guy (perhaps even more intelligent when in a group of expert peers) who has some genuine interest in decentralization and he has some valid ideas mixed with some invalid ones. But he seems to me to be person who overestimates his actual accomplishments and progress. I’ve known people like this in my life. They’re more about talk than coding. He appears to me to be a visionary organizer type, but lacking the rigor and discipline to make it happen. And thus he is making some mistakes in overall conceptualization and apparently losing control of the organization as well. Also the list of involved people on the Skycoin website is very vague about identities and career history. So it claims they all know math. Millions of people know math. It doesn’t really tell me anything about the people involved.

On a personal level Synth seems like a fun person and has an interesting sense of sarcastic humor. I think he’s a free thinker and throws caution to the wind sometimes for spontaneity (I have that mischievous trait also when I’m letting my hair down and goofing off). His personality type reminds me of past friendships who were great friends but were failure directed and self-sabotaging as work partners.

Perhaps I am incorrect, but the onus is on them to increase transparency.

I’d like to be wrong. I’d like to find another talented, dedicated group to collaborate with.

That being said, I try to remain open-minded and give people the benefit of the doubt.

Apparently during the development of Skycoin, there are hundreds of attacks and FUD campaigns against trying to bring Skycoin down

All I have found on the Internet thus far are legitimate concerns about the lack of transparency as explained above.

For example, even they were originally selling SKY tokens via Bitmessage presumably to make it untraceable as to whom was issuing the tokens.