I think you definitely supported Truthful's high school metaphor (which was actually a simile),

with the ending of your post. And you are not so respectful either.
In general, though, I agree with Truthful's sentiment; speaking for myself, I supported VIA as a bet on btcdrak and Peter doing things on VIA that Bitcoin would never do, in particular TreeChains.
Helped me either way, because I had way more value in BTC than VIA, but if I knew that VIA would not even be much of a test chain for BTC innovation, I would not have put any BTC in it.
And doing what Bitcoin wouldn't, was certainly how btcdrak presented VIA back then, especially regarding Peter's involvement. Maybe I just misunderstood his intentions, or something happened, but I doubt it. I think it's just that most people don't present their true intentions, especially where money is involved...
So, for what it's worth, I don't think as highly of VIA and btcdrak at this point, but I did bet on them freely, and lost the investment so far.
Lesson learned: don't bet on personalities and most of what they say they plan to do. Ultimately though, every investment requires some trust in its salespeople.
If none of us trusted Satoshi's vision and intent, (not to imply that anyone involved with VIA is Satoshi-grade) none of us would be here, or made the money we made in crypto.
So, as someone else said here, I just hope that what goes around always comes around to all of us - good and otherwise.
Happy holidays!
CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY
REPLACEBYFEE
Here, I'll quote for you, because we all know clicking is hard for millennials.
I'm sure if early investors knew that VIA was becoming a glorified token to further development work on Bitcoin and Drak's OKCoin account they would have though twice about investing. Saying "well the code will be featured in Viacoin too!" is such a copout. If they wanted to beg for BTC to further develop Bitcoin then be upfront about it, but pitching us a new alt coin that claims to fix the problems of Bitcoin while taking these solutions to Bitcoin is deceptive.
The whole selling point of Viacoin was to do things on its chain that Bitcoin core devs supposedly refuse to implement. Yet suddenly every innovation produced for VIA is actually getting in the Bitcoin code, which makes the original argument for VIA's existence null and void.
Look I know Drak, Todd and you Icebreaker are a bunch of autists who don't think like normal human beings and you think it is perfectly acceptable to ask for almost half a million dollars for a few hundred lines of code but some of us live in the real world where such obscene salaries would normally command in the business world at the minimum a 50-60 hour work week for a whole year and personal cell phone access on the weekends.
This business of Drak getting on twitter everyday, yacking about what is going on in whaleclub, and accusing Gavin of driving people to suicide and then occasionally popping in once a month to write a line or two here and contributing little to the Viacoin github is unacceptable. I'd fired his ass a long time ago if he was on my staff.
The question is has he delivered 600 BTC worth of work and effort into Via? the answer is a solid NO.
What's funny is you got guys like Dave Zimbeck who himself alone built Bithalo, Nighttrader, a working decentralized marketplace with Bitbay, 2-party smart contracts and is in the process of finalizing pegging and all while managing to stay active with his community on an at-least weekly basis and yet he gets called the scammer!
This whole place really is like high school made up of cliques.
Perhaps if you were more of an "autist" you would understand why some lines of code are vastly more valuable and difficult to produce than others.
We all knew PT's dev work would explicitly benefit both BTC and VIA; that was the deal all along. It's only 'shocking' 'scandalous' news to you.
VIA got CLTV months before Bitcoin. The market didn't care, but that's no excuse for you to whine about it. The point is Via had (and still has) its chance to shine.
Your 20/20 hindsight is asinine and immature. If VIA/XCH had gone to the moon thanks to their advanced features, 600 BTC would have been a small price to pay.
But unfortunately that hasn't happened yet, so now you feel entitled to retroactively pooh-pooh what has been accomplished, as if shepherding CLTV from concept to battle-tested code is some small thing?
IDC about your lame high school:cliques metaphor. It has no value beyond providing a vent for your pouting.
You should please go sodomize yourself with retractable batons.