I think it is very important that criticism be scrupulously correct because low quality criticism discredits critics in general and makes it much harder for people to receive the criticism.
There are plenty of critical things you can say about Blockstream but Cøbra pretty reliably says none of them-- and instead tends to lob conspiratorial bombs that go over like lead balloons such as cashbleed.com.
For a company's who's motto is "don't trust, verify", all their products require quite a bit of trust. Let's go through and evaluate:
- Blockstream Satellite: A service that broadcasts the Bitcoin blockchain to the entire world with the aim of reducing Bitcoin's dependency on internet access. It isn't hard to see where things fall apart here. First, you can't obviously do an initial sync from a satellite,
You can now, though this wasn't announced when you wrote your post-- your "obvious claim" isn't obvious.
it just broadcasts the latest blocks. Secondly, if you run the satellite receiver, you are putting all your faith in Blockstream's uplink to give you the right blocks. Should you find yourself in a situation with no internet, and only a satellite, you are blindly putting faith in Blockstream's version of the Bitcoin blockchain. It's even worse than running an SPV node, Blockstream is basically sybil attacking you. At any time they can just choose to stop sending you new blocks and you're shit out of luck.
No different in the case when your internet link is down than running your node a single ISP which is the situation for 99.99% of users. The distinction is that unlike an internet connection which has a substantial monthly fee (and often only has a single monopoly provider available in an area), the sat feed has a cost to setup using all commercially available parts (or even mostly literal garbage if you're skilled enough) and has no monthly cost. So having it *in addition* to some other network connection isn't too hard a decision.
Sure, the feed has limitations but so does everything.
- Blockstream Green: Claims to be a simple and secure Bitcoin wallet. It isn't simple, nor secure. It uses 2-of-2 multi-sig, between you and Blockstreams' server. All transactions you do require Blockstream's signature. If their server goes down, you can't do any transactions, since they can't sign off on it. All your amounts are co-owned by Blockstream. It's even worse than running an SPV wallet. Because they sign all your transactions, they can also see all your transactions, and your IP addresses, destroying your privacy.
It's an open-source electrum-style-spv mobile wallet (keys on client, uses a server), it existed for years before Blockstream acquired it-- I can't find any evidence of you complaining about it before then. It has the limited privacy properties implied by that kind of wallet. Those privacy properties suck, but they're ubiquitous. I don't think blockstream has ever been misleading about them. If you want actual privacy you're using Bitcoin Core, but that's not a realistic option on a mobile device.
It supports 2-of-3 where the user has two of the keys, or 2-of-2 with CSV that degrades to being spendable with your own coins after a delay. Perhaps there are bugs/limits I don't know about (I don't use it) but I don't believe there is anything blockstream can do with it worse than delay your access to the coins. (or of course, quietly give you malware-- as is the case with any software).
I'd personally prefer people use wallets with better privacy properties but there aren't a lot of options in the mobile space. And some of the makers of mobile wallets have altcoin conflicts of interest and have fairly hostile to Bitcoin in general at times, so I'm glad it exists.
- Blockstream's Liquid sidechain: A federated sidechain that lets you do faster transactions and apparently gives you privacy. Here, users are asked to hand over their BTC to a federation, so that it can become L-BTC, the federation can literally steal all your bitcoins and block any transactions you make. They tried to market it as "trustless", until one of their own co-founders called them out on it: https://twitter.com/TheBlueMatt/status/1060101587584991233.
Liquid was originally created so that the parties keeping their coins there were self-same as the federation. Inviting other people to directly use it creates the trust exposure that you're talking about. Matt was absolutely right to call that out. I think there is absolutely a place for trusty solutions-- e.g. if you're keeping funds in liquid that you'd otherwise be keeping directly in a member exchange (a single party trusted solution) for ready trading access, then it would be an extremely defensible position that this was a security improvement. Trustless though? My ass. Trust mitigate? somewhat.
The complaint that blockstream exaggerated Liquid's security model in some public communication is an extremely good one, but I think it's unfortunate that you buried it after a bunch of weak-sauce ones and in a message that also spread some nonsense conspiracy theories like claiming 'The Blockstream propaganda of "Cobra is evil!"' is something that that exists. By doing that you discredit yourself and other people sharing legit complaints and make it easier for blockstream to ignore them and harder for people to find legitimate concerns.
Let's assume for a moment that Adam Back owned bitcoin.org, would you character assassinate him for supporting the Hong Kong agreements
I had zero problem calling that out ... and many other people didn't either. Similarly on the liquid trustlessness comment it was called out in public be several current employees of the company, not just former ones.
It sounds like you think Blockstream isn't being subject to criticism compared to you: But they
are-- I think a lot more of it--, and more over they in less of a position of public trust than you are.