What the heck is Blockstream doing now?

[PrimeNumber7]

You can't really blame a company if it's looking to launch new products or take a new direction. Every company needs to evolve to stay in the game, otherwise it becomes a dinausor

I don't get it either.
It's a company that received funding from investors when they presented their plans, all that money was put in there with the hope of generating more money, not some utopian dreams, companies don't work like that if they would have gone only on nonprofit endeavors they would be long gone by now.

There are a lot of people around here that are insistent that everyone should work for free. IMO, it is utopian nonsense.

I personally think these tokens are tacky, but there is clearly a market for what they are selling, and AFAICT, they aren’t misleading anyone, so I don’t see an issue.

Further, most of their projects are on GitHub so anyone can fork/copy what they are offering if they think they can offer a better product.

[dkbit98]

Blockstream will now be a sponsor for Federated E-Cash as a Bitcoin scaling technology, with purpose of having blind signatures for improving privacy and usability for bitcoin.
E-cash concept was first mentioned in 1983 paper ''On Blind Signatures for Untraceable Payments'' by David Chaum, and coins will be held in bitcoin multisig wallet.
Some people say that this may eliminate the need for using any privacy altcoins, and from what I am reading first version should be released somewhere in Q1 of 2022, but now it's still in experimental stages.
This is interesting for sure and it can help scale Bitcoin, but the issue I have is that federation members should be trusted and considered honest.


Source: https://medium.com/blockstream/blockstream-sponsors-federated-e-cash-as-a-bitcoin-scaling-technology-637ba05de7b3

Experimental Rust implementation of Federated E-Cash called Minimint is available for testing:
https://github.com/fedimint/minimint

[dkbit98]

If you think that NFTs are (stupid) money grab scheme only found on ethereum or similar centralized blockchains and has nothing to do with unique art, than you were wrong.
Blockstream and Liquid Network decided they need to have their own platfrom for NFTs called Raretoshi.com, but I have to be honest and say that it is full of rubbish.
You probably heard they have plans to create tokenized bonds and more tokens on Liquid, and they already have L-USDT, so I really don't understand why they are still calling out other altcoins, when they are constantly doing exact same thing.

Raretoshi is the first NFT platform that uses the Bitcoin Liquid Network instead of Ethereum or Counterparty. The Liquid network is a bitcoin sidechain where transaction fees are denominated in L-BTC, Liquid Bitcoin, which is pegged 1:1 to bitcoin.

https://raretoshi.com/faq

[NeuroticFish]

If you think that NFTs are (stupid) money grab scheme only found on ethereum or similar centralized blockchains and has nothing to do with unique art, than you were wrong.
Blockstream and Liquid Network decided they need to have their own platfrom for NFTs

NFTs are a gold mine for all who sell or take fees on selling them.
Blockstream is a company, hence their target is... to make money. Everybody who can, tries nowadays to sell or provide a platform for selling NFT. I'm not surprised that they do this too.

And whatever they say... that's only about how they're selling their image, really. At companies one have to see what they do.
Look at the bright side: all this crap probably also funds useful things too.