The Lightning Network isn’t ‘helplessly broken’

This is a real and specific vulnerability. But it is a timed race against an attacker who must actively solve one of the hardest mathematical problems in existence, within a fixed window, for each individual output they want to steal. It is not a passive, silent drain on every Lightning wallet simultaneously.

The quantum hardware reality check

Here is the part that rarely makes it into the headlines: cryptographically relevant quantum computers do not exist today, and the gap between where we are and where we would need to be is enormous.

Breaking Bitcoin's elliptic curve cryptography requires solving the discrete logarithm on a 256-bit key, a roughly 78-digit number, using millions of stable, error-corrected logical qubits running for an extended period. The largest number ever factored using Shor's algorithm on actual quantum hardware is 21 (3 × 7), achieved in 2012 with significant classical post-processing assists. The most recent record is a hybrid quantum-classical factoring of a 90-bit RSA number, impressive progress, but still roughly 2⁸³ times smaller than what it would actually take to break Bitcoin.

Google's quantum research is real and worth watching. The timelines discussed by serious researchers range from optimistic estimates for the late 2020s to more conservative projections for the 2030s or beyond. None of that is "your Lightning balance is at risk today."

The development community is not sitting still

Wertheimer's framing, that Lightning developers are "helpless", is also out of step with what is actually happening. Since December alone, the Bitcoin development community has produced more than five serious post-quantum proposals: SHRINCS (324-byte stateful hash-based signatures), SHRIMPS (2.5 KB signatures across multiple devices, roughly three times smaller than the NIST standard), BIP-360, Blockstream's hash-based signatures paper, and proposals for OP_SPHINCS, OP_XMSS, and STARK-based opcodes in tapscript.

The correct framing is not that Lightning is broken and unfixable. It is that Lightning, like all of Bitcoin, and like most of the internet's cryptographic infrastructure, requires a base-layer upgrade to become quantum-resistant, and that work is underway.

What this means for businesses building on Lightning today

Lightning processes real payment volume for real enterprises today, iGaming platforms, crypto exchanges, neobanks, and payment service providers moving money globally at fractions of a cent with instant finality. The question businesses should be asking is not whether to abandon Lightning based on a theoretical future threat, but whether the teams building Lightning infrastructure are paying attention to what is coming and planning accordingly.

The answer, based on the volume and quality of post-quantum research happening in the Bitcoin development community right now, is yes.

The Lightning Network is not helplessly broken. It faces the same long-horizon cryptographic challenge as the entire digital financial system, and it has a development community actively working to address it. That is a different story from the one the headline told.