The project was self-funded from previous successful ventures. That answers your first question.
As for the "SEO consultants" - neither one of us does consulting work, so I don't know where you got that either. We're all quite technical actually.
So what is the current status of the project? it seems like you have not done anything for a year on the project but now it got submitted to HN? Bitcoin must have changed a lot in that time so i guess this is already a dead business just a cool project idea?
Why it got submitted - I don't know who did it, it was neither one of us! But it's nice to see that someone's still interested in what you did.
One thing that I really should do is some kind of closure & public after action review...