So.....  600 BTC went where exactly?

It may also be of interest how Viacoin fits into this picture. Firstly, since Viacoin is based on Bitcoin Core it is a downstream project from Bitcoin Core. That means, anything that goes into Bitcoin may also end up in Viacoin. The fact remains that Bitcoin Core is the most active project with the most expertise and peer review in the cryptocurrency ecosystem.

Overall, my goal with Viacoin was to contribute positively to the ecosystem and that even if my project was not successful, that it would have a legacy that was useful for the world at large. The invention of bitcoin is an incredibly important invention for humanity and I want to see the technology develop and succeed.

This being the case, Peter and I agreed that it makes no sense to develop features in a vacuum because this stuff is hard and takes a long time to mature. Even if the target was for Viacoin (and in the example of CLTV, it was first deployed in Viacoin in January 2015), it makes sense that the BIPs and development work go on upstream with the aim of filtering back down. This ensures several criterion are met: that work is well peer reviewed and where possible contributions end up in Bitcoin Core and benefit everyone. If something is included in Bitcoin it must have been considered a good thing and is well peer reviewed and tested. Viacoin will benefit downstream: but the reverse is not true, something developed exclusively for Viacoin will never have the same level of quality.

All things being equal, if the feature/fix is merged to Bitcoin Core, that's a win for the Bitcoin ecosystem and for Viacoin which will get the feature downstream. If the feature is considered a bad idea as revealed by peer review, it stops a bad idea. If the idea is good but too radical for Bitcoin (which is hard to change because of it's size due to risks, or osification), then Viacoin is still at liberty to make the feature itself because Viacoin is much smaller. There almost no ossification and a lot less risks.

Peter is his own man, guided by his own lights. To be clear his principals about Bitcoin override everything. So I let him get on with Bitcoin Core work he wanted but didnt necessarily have time to do without being paid since paid consulting takes priority. I say this because it's not possible to have a conflict of interest with Peter involved, he will never do something he doesn't believe in and want to do in the first place.

I would like to comment about "number of commits". It may not be apparent to readers who are not directly involved in Bitcoin development, but writing code may actually be the least time consuming part of development. The amount of time required to even tests a patch cannot be underestimated. It can take a long time to get things right, and it may take a long time for reviewers to find problems. Unlike most other projects, it is incredible easy to introduce consensus bugs or introduce attack vectors with incredible consequences. Consensus systems really are difficult and code review, testing and security reviews are extremely time consuming. Even when one writes a patch, especially consensus or policy code it is very time consuming to do all the ancillary work of writing BIPs, discussion and championing the pull request and competing for reviewers (yes, literally there is competition to get stuff reviewed because there are so many patches and things going on).

Since all this blocksize debacle, I have also become very involved in Bitcoin Core helping where I can especially in the area of scalability, code review and testing. I can vouch it is entirely possible to spend weeks on end with very little material to show. It's just the nature of the work.

So whether you like or hate Viacoin, CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY for example, was materialsed because of it. That is to say, without paying Peter it is very unlikely the necessary work would have done the work on materialising CLTV and it would not have been deployed in Bitcoin today. I take no credit for CLTV, it is an invention of Peter Todd and Greg Maxwell, but I did provide the oil to make it happen. CLTV was deployed (enforced) in Viacoin in January 2015 and we're about to begin deployment in Bitcoin Core. CLTV is widely anticipated by service provider developers (wallets, micropayment channels, lightning network), and I've affectionally nicknamed it OP_HODL. RBF is another big contribution which has seen several iterations. That means a lot of code, and as yet still unmerged, although it seems likely this will be added soon.

Overall, Peter is an incredibly valuable asset to the Bitcoin community. There are very few people with the kind of deep understanding and attention to detail. It has been a privilege working with him.