[kobeya]

Blockstream has said that their work on Lightning is purely for the benefit of the community -- they hired a known open source developer and gave him free reign to develop his implementation of Lightning (there are 5 competing implementations from other organizations!) in the open, on github, with public purview and no strings attached. It is not covered by any patents by Blockstream, and written to be compatible with a community agreed upon standard. It is a fully peer-to-peer protocol with no central clearing house.

So explain to me how Blockstream benefits?

[stale2002]

Blockstream benefits because the company is doing lightning network consulting.

That is their entire business model. If the lightning network doesn't come to fruition, their company is screwed.

[sanswork]

So their entire business model is lightning which came around 2 years after they launched? How did they convince investors to give them $76m prior to their entire business model existing?