They have parents on a second layer (lightning network) that would run on top of Bitcoin and would make money on the transactions, effectively making bitcoin "theirs".
What specific claims of those patents are being infringed? It looks like that person just posted every crypto patent then could find. Also which of those patents do blockstream own? I looked at a few random ones and none were owned by them.
LN fees are optional and if blockstream wanted to charge them for facilitating transactions they would have to provide a service to make it worth while our the transactions would just route around them.
Blockstream has said that their work on Lightning is purely for the benefit of the community -- they hired a known open source developer and gave him free reign to develop his implementation of Lightning (there are 5 competing implementations from other organizations!) in the open, on github, with public purview and no strings attached. It is not covered by any patents by Blockstream, and written to be compatible with a community agreed upon standard. It is a fully peer-to-peer protocol with no central clearing house.
So their entire business model is lightning which came around 2 years after they launched? How did they convince investors to give them $76m prior to their entire business model existing?
How does it benefit Blockstream?