Bitcoin developer Paul Sztorc set off a fresh round of debate over the Lightning Network this month with a blunt assessment: in his view, Bitcoiners are lying to themselves about how well the payments layer actually works.

“Most people don’t realize how bad the Lightning Network is,” Sztorc said in an October 4 post on X, “because there has been a vast, years long conspiracy to lie about the LN user experience.”

He argued that custodial Lightning services account for more than 80% of payments and described their promotion as a “vast campaign of fraud on par with Elizabeth Holmes’ Theranos,” a reference to the sham blood-testing device company whose founder was convicted of fraud.

Because Lightning payments are private by design, the custodial share of activity cannot be established from public network data alone. Sztorc did not respond to Cointelegraph Magazine’s requests for comment.

His scathing criticism has revived a question Bitcoin developers have wrestled with for years: has Lightning actually made Bitcoin easier to use, or has the community become invested in the Layer 2 protocol that it overlooks its shortcomings?

A usability problem built into the design

Lightning was designed to enable faster, cheaper Bitcoin transactions without every payment having to be individually recorded on the blockchain, but its underlying mechanics have often created friction for users and businesses alike.

In a one-click world where users of traditional finance rails can tap a card or click a mouse to complete a transaction, Lightning’s payment channels depend on liquidity being available in the right places at the right times. Each channel requires bitcoin locked on-chain between two parties, capital that stays tied up until the channel is closed. Routing payments through the network can fail, especially larger payments that require several hops through different nodes.

Even Lightning’s head of liquidity, Alex Bosworth, acknowledged the network’s speed limitations this month. “the painful truth is that in a setup with privacy and p2p etc it’s extremely slow compared to tap to pay,” he wrote on X.

Running a node and managing channels is also far too technical for the average user, who just wants to pay for things and get on with their day. That trade-off is central to the high estimates of custodial use: custodial services are easier and often work better, at the cost of relying on a trusted intermediary — the kind of intermediary Bitcoin was created to remove from payments.

Everyday payments and the 99.66% success rate

Jesse Shrader, co-founder and chief executive of Lightning infrastructure provider Amboss, acknowledged that liquidity requirements are “challenging” to understand at first, but said they are “trivial to solve” with current tools or automation services.

“For everyday payments of around $100, most users can achieve 99% reliability in the core network,” Shrader told Cointelegraph Magazine, adding that Amboss’ simulations put the success rate for $100 payments at 99.66%.

The benchmark is encouraging, but it is not a verified, network-wide measure of how the network performs for everyone in practice. As the fine print of advertisements puts it: your results may vary.

In an April 2026 Reddit discussion, one user said he was “genuinely impressed” by how far the network had come technically, but still questioned how useful it was for everyday spending.

“There is still a gap in practice,” he said. “Every coffee shop, grocery store and gas station I walk into runs on Visa or Mastercard terminals. NFC tap to pay is the standard. Nobody is running a Lightning node at the point of sale and nobody is going to.”

Have developers solved the problem?

Danny Stagg, marketing lead at Bitcoin payments infrastructure provider Breez, said much of the criticism of Lightning’s user experience is now outdated.

“The criticism is not fair in 2026,” he told Cointelegraph Magazine, “but historically it was. For years, both developers and users were asked to understand the complexities of Lightning, like channels and inbound liquidity, just to get paid.”

He said the network has greatly improved over the past two years, with newer infrastructure abstracting much of that complexity away. “Non-custodial UX is now comparable with custodial,” he said.

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

Breez chief executive Roy Sheinfeld has said that AI coding tools are making it easier for developers to build Bitcoin-enabled applications, and that inquiries from prospective partners have rapidly increased, according to the company’s official blog. “That’s why we’re seeing more partners add Bitcoin every quarter,” Stagg said.

Still, growing developer interest does not necessarily mean more people are using Lightning for everyday payments.

The numbers show activity, not necessarily success

According to its 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.

That is an eye-catching figure, but it remains below Lightning’s August 2023 peak of 6.6 million transactions, suggesting transaction counts have not kept pace with the value moving through the network.

Crypto payment processor CoinGate, meanwhile, reported 782,403 paid crypto orders across its own customer base in the first half of 2026, up 21.4% year over year, with Lightning accounting for 9.6% of Bitcoin payments processed through its service, according to its H1 2026 payments data report.

What would count as success?

Shrader said that because network-level payment statistics are “impossible to produce unless you are party to the transactions themselves,” he is not buying Sztorc’s claim that more than 80% of Lightning payments are custodial.

“I distrust anyone who claims they can prove an 80% custodial share either way from public data alone,” he said.

Stagg said the claim “describes yesterday’s Lightning,” when custodial services offered an easier experience and non-custodial services had not yet “caught up.” Back in 2023, River estimated one self-custodial user for every eight custodial users. Without hard data that is up to date, the custody question cannot be settled, and the next rounds of the industry’s periodic reports are the most likely place that hard data will surface.

The same caution should apply to claims about Lightning adoption measured in metrics such as payment volume, network capacity or developer interest: each measures something different, and none alone can establish how easy the network is to use.

Businesses are processing payments and developers are finding ways to abstract technical complexity, but technical progress is not the same as mainstream usability.

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

This article is based on a feature first published by Cointelegraph Magazine.