It is their usual policy. It isn't evil, but smart and cutthroat. I am not attacking them, just waking up some naive investors into the likely outcome. If Ethereum is to succeed they need to expect to compete with MSFT eventually. If Bitcoin is to succeed , it will have to compete with at least some fiat currencies. (unlikely to dominate over fiat ever or anytime soon )
Blockstream also is a profit motivated company. The employees have set up the corporation differently however to insure their motivations are aligned with Bitcoin by locking up their large holdings of BTC. This doesn't mean that their vision or plans are necessarily correct.(I believe they do have a better roadmap, but time will tell) . This also doesn't mean they aren't also motivated to make tons of profit from selling consulting services and other sidechain products. We should be on guard with this and support many implementations (Bitcore, libbitcoin, ect...) and be very careful there are multiple payment channel solutions that are open source and equally accessible to all users. This means Bitpay needs to immediately finish developing "impulse" channel and WTF is coinbase doing without at least investigating a payment channel solution, and sitting by allowing people to steal from them with their weak 0 conf algo's that are easily defeatable.
I hear this bandied about, mainly by themselves, but now by their defenders. Do you have any specific information about the "locking up their large holdings of BTC", part? I question whether it is sufficient to ensure that their incentives align with the success of BTC, the token and native network, vs Blockstream, the Corporation.
Blockstream is a for profit corporation, now with $76MM of outside equity in the company. I will eat my shoe if their "time locked BTC compensation" is one twentieth of the amount of stock equity the founders now possess. Assuming this… I'm not convinced, at all, that they would refuse to hamper the utility of transacting on-chain in order to economically favor the solutions they are working hard to provide. Years ago, a bearish gmax famously claimed that Bitcoin was fundamentally broken, Adam Back ignored it until the bubble of 2013 (familiar?), I believe this is their effort to fix it. In that sense, I don't think they are being totally dishonest about their intentions or motivations, getting filthy rich is not their main goal, just a happy side effect of "fixing" a "broken" Bitcoin.
You mention side chains, and consulting, but you omit the possibility of them operating large, well funded, and highly connected lightning hubs, why? Simply because it will be open source and Joe Blow will have a fancy hub? Both of the changes they are pushing hard lately, Replace-By-Fee and Segregated Witness, are mandatory for these products to function. SW as currently designed gives signature heavy settlement transactions a 75% fee discount. Directly changing the economics of the system with hardly a debate about it… (the discount specifically).
Less listening and swallowing what they say... more watching what they do (and don't in the case of on-chain capacity) pls.