Only one of the implementation is coded by blockstream. It's a protocol, anybody else can create an implementation of it. Several other companies have created clients like LND (https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lnd) - probably more popular than clightning.
> How do we know that there isn't an easy backdoor that allows this network to be controlled for Blockstream's purposes?
The code of clightning is open source, so is the code of most known clients out there.
> The fact that it is so complex and ill defined is dangerous and an antithesis of decentralized system design and ethos
Your comment really seems like a baseless conspiracy theory full of ad hominems with no proof of what you mention:
- it's not that crazy complex compared to all the intricacies / op codes and game theory of the Bitcoin base layer
- it is more easily distributed than the base layer since it's easier to run a LN node by itself (albeit still relying on a bitcoin full node that may not be in your control if you wish it so).
And like other said, Blockstream doesn't have many employees working on the base protocol (3 now afaik since Luke Dash JR & G.Maxwell do not work for Blockstream anymore). The few they have actually made very useful contributions to the code base since 2011/2012 which you can easily see through and most of their code is also used in all forks of Bitcoin aka BTG, BCH etc...
> They were responsible for all the propaganda and talking points against bumping the block size leading to the BCH fork
Any proof on that? Almost no bitcoin developers (albeit none apart of maybe 1 if you count Gavin which didnt contribute for years on the code base) left to work on this particular fork. There was no scientific consensus stipulating larger blocks (than 4mb) would be safe hence why the community at large did not support BCH (and why it has a minority of market share and mining share, TX usage etc).
A minority of core devs work for blockstream. There are routinely dozens of devs every months comitting to github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin and only half a dozen work for blockstream. Chaincode labs commit more code than Blockstream.
Bitcoin is sound money like gold was a long time ago. MOE is going to happen as a use case, it's just far from being the most important use case.
transactions have been going through for a several weeks with 1-20 satoshi per byte. Unless you're in a hurry to get that image in a block, you can do it for 10 to 200 times cheaper than quoted price.
"hire CTO" as a goal
Team capabilities star ratings...