It's unclear exactly what Blockstream's business plan is supposed to be; however, we can infer that it involves private blockchains and consultations on blockchain technology. R3 (Hearn's employer) is also working on private blockchains, so Blockstream must be evil, right?

The difference is that Blockstream's solution can tie these private blockchains directly to Bitcoin via 2‑way pegs; this makes BTC an extremely valuable common medium of exchange amongst all the private systems that wish to be so connected—in fact, it's better than that; because of the guiding principles of robust decentralization above all else, it serves as a refuge to store value when there's doubt in the rest of the system.

Blockstream's solution makes Bitcoin the backbone of an Internet of Money.

The transactions of the world are not uniform in their requirements; there are various profiles of risk and cost and speed and payload—and any other property you can think of! Indeed, there is more trust in the world than Bitcoin assumes, and that trust can be used by some profiles in order to benefit everyone.

No single system can simultaneously cater to all profiles.

The profile that Bitcoin was designed to serve entails decentralized, trustless processing of "small casual transactions"—and of these properties, decentralization is paramount; after all, you can construct an inexpensive high-volume transaction system on top of a decentralized core system of nearly any sort, but you cannot construct a decentralized system on top of a centralized core system of any sort.

The Core of the ecosystem needs to be correct.

Above all else, the Core of the Bitcoin ecosystem must provide decentralized, trustless processing of transactions; once that goal has been met, an overlay network (like the Lightning Network) can be used to construct Bitcoin transactions in a way that is smarter than simply using Bitcoin directly. Furthermore, Bitcoin's token, BTC, can be pegged to the tokens of other systems that cater to all manner of different profiles.

In this way, every possible profile can be serviced and yet tied together with a common token, BTC; when there is doubt in the ecosystem, users can retreat to the safety of the cold, heartless, trustlesss core that is Bitcoin.

This makes Bitcoin the Core of an Internet of Money.

I, for one, welcome our Blockstream overlords.

Where is this money coming from? nvm oh venture capital firms and banks?
And how will the money be used? oh 'targeted toward the bitcoin network'

This sounds like great news, they sound like they want to build out the Bitcoin network so these parasitic in nature service providers can run their services on top of our network, using us for security.
This is an improvement over the old strategies of dividing the community and tricking the community into forking the code into oblivion.

I'm fine with parasites using the blockchain for security as long as they keep the bulk of the data they want to protect off the main chain and pay fees like the rest of us.

Only the code matters. Who is writing the code? We know this information. Who is influencing the people writing the code, and what are their intentions? To not question this would be stupid. To say that +$50 million has no influence would also be stupid.

Good point!  I agree.


I don't care.  Only the code matters.


I don't care; that's none of my business.  Only the code matters.

I think the answers were sarcastic.

War. What is it good for? Absolutely nothing

selling with the news!

The commercial use of blockchain could expand the user base and the value of bitcoin!

I think this could be a strong news!