[tylersmith]

The position of Bitcoin Core is that fees should be high and microtransactions should be infeasible, except on Blockstream's Lightning Network. The reason is that decentralization has costs and they believe fees need to be high to pay for it.

[kobeya]

Lightning was not invented by Blockstream, nor is Blockstream the majority player in that space either. They're just paying two open source developers (Rusty Russell and Christian Decker) to work on it. The original creators of Lightning have their own company, and there are at least five other competing implementations. BitFury employs more lightning developers than Blockstream and LightningCo combined.

[RustyRussell]

To be fair, the position of Core is more: "we don't know how to scale significantly without further threatening decentralization". The rest is a corollary of that.

[hultner]

What is the Blockstream's Lightning Network and how does it correlate with bitcoin?

How will bitcoin attract customers from traditional payment options if fees are higher?

[out_of_protocol]

That's level 2 solution, implemented on top of Bitcoin (you need to create bitcoin transactions to start interacting with LN and consequent "good" transactions are almost free).

One thing - it is not actually implemented in full and therefore can not be used in vivo.