Lightning's promise of instant, cheap Bitcoin payments is crippled by a fundamental design flaw: liquidity distribution. This analysis deconstructs how imbalanced capital locks create routing failures, centralize the network, and threaten its viability as a true L2 for DeFi and Ordinals.

• The Lightning Illusion: Fast, Cheap, and Broken
• Three Symptoms of a Liquidity Crisis
• The Physics of a Drying River: How Routing Fails
• The Centralization Tax: Lightning vs. Theoretical Ideal
• The Rebuttal: "But What About Multipath Payments and Liquidity Ads?"
• Builder Responses: Patching a Leaking Hull
• The Fork in the Road: Custodial Hubs or a New Architecture