Building second-layer solutions such as LN is the only sensible way to grow Bitcoin in the long-term. It'll allow tx capacity to grow by several orders of magnitude with minimal load on the Bitcoin network.
> Most (all?) of them are organized in a company called "Blockstream"
That's simply not true. Out of tens of developers who contribute on an ongoing basis and hundreds who contributed during the lifetime of the project, there are about 6-7 developers associated with Blockstream. Out of the 6 maintainers with commit access on GitHub, only a single developer is associated with Blockstream.
It's also worth mentioning that Blockstream was founded by several prominent Bitcoin developers that have been around for years and have a very strong track record. It's not some company that popped out of nowhere and started hiring Core devs. One of Blockstream's primary goals was to fund development on low-level Bitcoin infrastructure code, which is blessed in my view.
Here's what one of their investors, Reid Hoffman (co-founder at LinkedIn), has to say about that:
> And that’s why I’m participating in this first-round financing as an individual investor, and why Blockstream itself will function similarly to the Mozilla Corporation. Here, our first interest is maintaining and enhancing Bitcoin’s strong open ecosystem. And the structure we’ve chosen will give us the freedom and flexibility to prioritize public good over returns to investors.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20141117154558-1213-the-futur...