Smart people can waste decades on things that don't turn out to lead to anything. Academia is filled with scientists and mathematicians who spent a good portion of their life creating new systems and concepts that, with respect to them, can be described as a waste of time and a net negative for the world, because that person could have been pursuing better ideas with their time. I personally know a physicist who regrets spending years involved in string theory research. You would be surprised at how common it is for smart and highly technical people to fall into toiling away at flawed projects.
That's a distinct possibility, sure. But similarly, private companies can also waste their time and investments by attempting to cash in on the latest tech trends and have it all amount to very little profit when people realise they don't need to rely on that company to use that tech. And there's a much bigger risk of that happening to a company in a field like this one where the tech is primarily open-source. If particular companies are taking aggressive or predatory stances, I'd guess it's because they know their proposed business model has a limited shelf-life.
Lightning has a lot of flaws. How do you train users that to spend money, they need to put it in a channel first? OK. Maybe the wallet can automatically open channels. How do you explain that some of the users money is gone because transaction fees spiked on Bitcoin, and more satoshis had to be reserved for when the channel needs to be closed? OK. I guess you can put a disclaimer, or alert. How do you explain watchtowers? How about backups? The user probably expects to receive arbitrary amounts of value, but you're going to need to tell them to get some inbound capacity if they want to receive anything substantial. At some point, Lightning Labs will choose to abstract all this away, but that's going to pressure them to centralize (a centralized directory of liquidity providers, watchtowers, well connected nodes, etc).
There's a long way to go, no arguments there. I don't think anyone can promise beyond doubt that Lightning doesn't remain a niche thing for the more tech-savvy users as it is at the moment. But I don't see the harm in other dev teams attempting to make Lightning software more user friendly over time. There's still a fair amount of impetus behind development of the underlying Bitcoin protocol and further scaling and privacy improvements are in the pipeline.
Blockstream is a hostile actor in the space. They don't want Bitcoin to succeed. There are some good people working there, but those few good apples mostly collect their salary and focus their time on Bitcoin Core and cryptographic research, they tend to distance themselves from Blockstream's damaging products. Have you ever seen Pieter Wuille shilling Liquid? Nope. It's unclear to me how they ever plan on making money, but they will no doubt abuse their position of influence in the community for their own business interests at some point. They already attempted to market Liquid as "trustless", which lead to founder Matt Corallo publicly shaming them on Twitter.
I tend to view it the same way as the early dotcom days, where companies attempted to monetise walled-gardens and create something like a subscription service for their customers to have access to an enclosed intranet. The bigger idea resisted the corporate attempts to co-opt it. I'm confident the same will happen with Bitcoin. I just don't see a way for big business to "control" it,
unless we centralise the network to the extent that only companies would have sufficient resources to run a full node. That would definitely weaken Bitcoin's innate resistance to regulatory shutdown or corporate takeover.
Out of curiosity, do you feel the existence of the Lightning Network is the direct result of Blockstream's influence? Or is there a possibility that the idea would have been pursued without Blockstream having their fingers in the pies? If
this email excerpt is genuine, then it appears satoshi theorised something vaguely akin to Lightning several years prior to the Lightning whitepaper being published. Maybe it was something that was always on the cards?
One use of nLockTime is high frequency trades between a set of parties.
They can keep updating a tx by unanimous agreement. The party giving
money would be the first to sign the next version. If one party stops
agreeing to changes, then the last state will be recorded at nLockTime. If
desired, a default transaction can be prepared after each version so n-1
parties can push an unresponsive party out. Intermediate transactions do
not need to be broadcast. Only the final outcome gets recorded by the
network. Just before nLockTime, the parties and a few witness nodes
broadcast the highest sequence tx they saw.