Is Bitcoin Joking About the Lightning Network?

Bitcoin developer Peter Todd says Bitcoiners are lying to themselves about Lightning. Developers claim usability has improved, but questions remain about everyday adoption.

Bitcoin developer Paul Stork says bitcoiners are lying to themselves about Lightning. Developers claim improved usability, but questions remain about day-to-day adoption.

Bitcoin developer Paul Stork ruffled a few feathers this month with a scathing assessment of the Lightning Network: Bitcoiners are lying to themselves about how well it's doing.

"Most people don't realize how bad the Lightning Network is because there has been a long and widespread conspiracy to ***lie*** about the LN user experience," Sztorc said in an Oct. 4 post on X .

He argued that Lightning Guard Services accounted for more than 80 percent of payments and described their promotion as a "massive fraud campaign on par with Elizabeth Holmes' Theranos," he said, referring to the fake blood-testing device company whose founder was convicted of fraud.

Lightning payments are private by design, making it impossible to create storage shares of public network data. Sztorc did not respond to the Journal's requests for comment.

But his scathing criticism re-raises an issue that bitcoin developers have wrestled with for years: Has Lightning made bitcoin easier to use, or is the community so invested in the Layer 2 protocol that it's overlooking its shortcomings?

Lightning is designed to enable faster and cheaper Bitcoin transactions without having to record any individual payments on the blockchain, but its underlying mechanisms often create friction for users and businesses.

Sztorc says people don't understand how bad the Lightning network is. Source: Paul Sztorc

In a one-click world where TradFi rail users can tap a card or click a mouse to complete a transaction, Lightning's unconventional payment channels rely on liquidity being available in the right places at the right times. Routing payments through the network may fail, especially larger payments that require multiple hops through different nodes.

Even Lightning's head of liquidity, Alex Bosworth, said this month: "The painful truth is that it's very slow to launch with privacy and p2p and so on compared to Tap to pay."

On top of that, running a node and managing channels is too technical for the average user who just wants to pay for things and go about their day. This is the reason for the high estimates of using custody - it's easier and works better at the expense of using a trusted intermediary.

Jesse Schrader, co-founder and CEO of lightning infrastructure provider Amboss, admits that understanding liquidity needs is "challenging" at first, but he says that solving them with current tools or automation services is "trivial."

"For daily payments of around $100, most users can achieve 99 percent reliability on the mainnet," he tells the magazine, adding that Amboss simulations show a 99.66 percent success rate for $100 payments.

Lightning's trading volume exceeded $1 billion in November 2025. Source: River

While this is an encouraging measure, it is not a validated, network-wide measure of everyone's experience in practice. As they say in the fine print, your results may vary.

In an April 2026 Reddit discussion, one user said he was "really impressed" with how far the network has come technically, but still questions how useful it is for day-to-day spending. He continued: In practice, there is still a gap.

Danny Stagg, director of marketing at bitcoin payment infrastructure provider Breez, says many of the criticisms of Lightning's user experience are now outdated.

"It's not fair to criticize in 2026, but historically it was," he tells the magazine. "For years, developers and users were required to understand the intricacies of Lightning, such as channels and incoming liquidity, in order to get paid."

He says the network has improved a lot in the past two years, and newer infrastructure has removed many of those complexities. "Un-Custudial UX is now comparable to custody," he says.

Users no longer need to manage channels or run their own nodes for a wallet or app to provide Lightning payments, as developers and service providers can do much of the work under the hood.

Breez CEO Roy Sheinfeld says AI coding tools are making it easier for developers to build Bitcoin-based apps, and requests from potential partners have grown rapidly.

"That's why we're seeing more partners adding bitcoin every quarter," says Stagg.

But growing developer interest doesn't necessarily mean more people are using Lightning for everyday payments.

According to the 2026 Bitcoin Adoption Report, financial services company River estimated that Lightning processed $1.17 billion in transaction volume across 5.22 million transactions in November 2025 alone.

While this number sounds impressive, it is lower than Lightning's peak of 6.6 million transactions in August 2023, indicating that the number of transactions has not kept pace with the value moving through the network.

Crypto payment processor CoinGate reported that in the first half of 2026, 782,403 cryptocurrency orders were paid to its customer base, an increase of 21.4% over the previous year, and Lightning accounted for 9.6% of bitcoin payments processed through its service.

Lightning accounts for 9.6% of Bitcoin payments. Source: CoinGate

Schrader says that since network-wide payment statistics "aren't generated unless you're a party to the transactions," he doesn't accept Sztorc's claim that more than 80 percent of Lightning payments are monitored.

Stagg says the claim describes "yesterday's thunderbolt conditions," when maintenance services offered an easier experience and walk-in services had yet to "catch up." (In 2023, River estimated one guardianship user for every eight custody users). But without up-to-date hard data, the custody question cannot be resolved.

And the same caution should be applied to claims related to Lightning acceptance by criteria such as payment volume, network capacity, or developer interest; Each one measures something different, and none alone can demonstrate how easy Lightning is to use.

Businesses process payments and developers find ways to abstract technical complexity, but technical progress is not the same as common usability.

The real criticism may not be that Lightning has failed, but whether its backers are combining evidence of what the network can do with what people actually do on the network.