> Blockstream Liquid makes them a middleman
He asked about Bitcoin transaction middlemanship, not alternative ledger consensus systems. It should not be surprising that alternative ledgers exist that provide some features that Bitcoin doesn't.
> They also work on the lightning network, which creates middlemen.
LN transactions are just zero-conf Bitcoin transactions with some extra opcodes and defined behavior around the semantics of when certain transactions can be verified. see http://lightning.network/
> In general, all Blockstream's products are solutions to the problems of (1) bitcoin being hard to change/fork, and (2) the block size being small. Blockstream's products are thus more relevant and useful if bitcoin is difficult to improve, and has limited capacity.
Bitcoin is more useful if it's difficult to be "improved", period. Auto-update mechanisms take away voluntary participation and this is too dangerous for a financial system that is attempting to be decentralized (who's gonna "authorize" the updates, eh?). So yes maybe Blockstream has an incentive to assist with maintaining the current Bitcoin decentralization mechanisms... so what?
> Blockstream employees unanimously oppose every proposed hard fork to bitcoin.
jtimon? sipa? dude you know these people, wtf.
> He needs people to have a good reason to switch to a Sidechain. If Bitcoin keeps improving, there will be no good reason.
No, he doesn't need a good reason for people to switch. He needs a reason for people to use sidechains, thankfully he and everyone has many. This isn't about switching -_-.
> If Bitcoin keeps improving, there will be no good reason.
That's like saying "if positive changes are made to bitcoin.git, there's no reason to use sidechains"... That's not a reasonable argument.
> Blockstream employees unanimously oppose every proposed hard fork to bitcoin. They are making it hard to improve bitcoin.
They are opposed to hard-forks for many reasons, but perhaps most important here is because they aren't in control of Bitcoin network hard-forks. And they are unwilling to campaign to add those particular hard-forks into Bitcoin Core. It's wrong to claim that Blockstream is making it hard to improve Bitcoin when it's naturally hard to do so by design in the first place.