Paul Stork: Most Don't Realize How Bad Lightning Is

Bitcoin developer Paul Stork criticized the Lightning Network, stating that users are misguided about its operation and reliance on custodial services. In a post on X dated October 4, he wrote: "Most people don't realize how bad the Lightning Network is because there has been a massive campaign for years to distort the truth about the user experience." According to him, custodial Lightning services account for more than 80% of payments, and he compared their promotion to a "deception campaign comparable to Theranos" – the company of Elizabeth Holmes, whose founder was found guilty of fraud.

Stork did not respond to requests from the publication. Payments in Lightning are private by nature, so it is impossible to determine the share of custodial transfers from the network's open data. This brings back the question developers have been discussing for years: has Lightning made Bitcoin more convenient, or has the community become so involved in the second-layer protocol that it has stopped noticing its shortcomings?

Lightning was designed for faster and cheaper transactions without recording every operation on the blockchain, but the mechanics often create difficulties. Payment channels depend on liquidity being in the right place at the right time. Routing may fail, especially for large payments requiring multiple hops through different nodes. Lightning's head of liquidity, Alex Bosworth, himself admitted: "The painful truth is that with privacy and p2p, it is extremely slow compared to one-touch payment." Moreover, running a node and managing channels is too technical for the average user, hence the high estimates of the share of custodial services: they are simpler and work better but require a trusted intermediary.

Jesse Schrader, co-founder and CEO of infrastructure provider Amboss, acknowledges that liquidity requirements are "complex" at the start, but with modern tools and automation, they are "trivially solved." For everyday payments of about $100, most users achieve 99% reliability, and Amboss simulations showed 99.66%. This is an encouraging benchmark but not a proven measure of all users' experience on the network.

Danny Stagg, head of marketing at Breez, believes that criticism of the Lightning user experience is now outdated: "In 2026, this criticism is unfair, but historically it was justified." According to him, the infrastructure has greatly improved over two years, and the non-custodial experience is now comparable to the custodial one. Breez CEO Roy Sheinfeld adds that AI tools for programming make it easier for developers to create Bitcoin applications, and there has been a noticeable increase in requests from potential partners.