It's okay, though.  These troubled individuals might have convinced themselves they're right, but anyone with an ounce of sense will look at them the same way they look at other conspiracy theorist screwballs like Flat-Earthers, Anti-Vaxxers and people who believe 5G somehow causes plagues.  If they had just one idea about the Bitcoin protocol which held even a modicum of technical merit, someone would be coding it, but no one is.  So they continue to scream for attention for the rest of their sad little lives because they'll never get what they want.



I can see why corporate interests are a concern in a decentralised and open-source platform, but I honestly think people take it too far sometimes.  If developers are only coding something because a company is paying them to, that would indeed present a conflict of interests.  However, if developers are producing code that they personally believe will be beneficial to Bitcoin and also happen to be receiving an income from a company to continue their work, that's an entirely different matter.  I'm not convinced that any one company has a "grasp" on Bitcoin.

The difference should be obvious in practice.  When Joseph Poon and Thaddeus Dryja published their ideas in the Lightning whitepaper, people took notice regardless of where their income was sourced.  Those who understood it recognised the potential and it sparked enough interest to result in multiple implementations, each with numerous team members, all producing code.  There wouldn't be several teams of people working on it if no one thought it was a good idea, no matter how much money someone might be willing to throw at it. 

In stark comparison, when some of the more vocal anti-blockstream evangelists (some of whom are here in this topic) present their ideas for how to "improve" Bitcoin, those who understand development take absolutely no notice because the ideas are often terrible, would likely centralise the Bitcoin network and generally have no technical merit whatsoever.  No implementations, no teams, no code.  Just incessant, whiny noise and half-baked concepts that go nowhere.  So these people, with their wounded pride, bitter and resentful over the fact that no one is paying attention to their "vision", rather than accepting the reality that their ideas are terrible, seemingly have no alternative but to engage in the fantasy that it's all a big conspiracy and that a shady company is pulling all the strings and manipulating the protocol to suit their evil corporate greed.

It would almost be amusing if it weren't so sad.  It also doesn't help that these self-righteous, ego-maniacal zealots are openly hostile.  They can't present a coherent argument without there being some boogeyman to attack and blame for all the things they can't understand or rationalise.  And then they wonder why they receive hostility in return.

At the end of the day, developers in a project like this are ideally not beholden to anyone.  Not the corporate entities and certainly not the conspiracy-theorist crazies who seem to believe they're owed a client that reflects their own unique interpretation on how this should all work.