Higher Latency & Lower Throughput Tor routes every packet through at least three relays, adding round‑trip delays and reducing bandwidth. Lightning itself already uses onion‑routing for payments, so layering Tor on top triples the indirection overhead. In practice this means slower channel opens, slower payment forwarding, and longer reconnection times after outages .

Reduced Reliability & Availability Tor circuits can drop unexpectedly, and hidden services sometimes go offline when their introduction points time out. A clearnet node will generally stay connected to peers far more consistently, avoiding intermittent disconnects that can force channels to go “offline” until you manually or automatically reconnect .

Liquidity & Network‑Partitioning Concerns Pure‑Tor nodes form a sort of “closed subnet” within Lightning: they can only peer with other Tor‑enabled nodes. While Tor‑only nodes are numerous, most of the network’s liquidity lives in clearnet‑reachable nodes. That means Tor‑only operators often find it harder to route through or attract inbound channels, limiting their node’s earning potential .

Operational Complexity Running a Tor hidden service for both Bitcoin Core and your LN daemon requires extra configuration (e.g. torrc, bitcoin.conf, lnd.conf tweaks), careful firewall rules, and ongoing maintenance when Tor upgrades or your onion address changes. Some operators prefer the simpler “open port 9735 + UPnP” approach of clearnet nodes.

Attack Surface & DDoS While Tor can help hide your IP, it’s not immune to denial‑of‑service. Hidden services can be targeted by circuit‑tearing attacks, introduction‑point exhaustion, or malicious HSDir operators. Some exit‑node or directory‑authority compromises can also expose metadata, meaning Tor isn’t a silver bullet for privacy or security .

Alternative Privacy Tools For those worried about IP linkage, VPNs or SSH tunnels can offer comparable obfuscation without Tor’s performance penalty. Others rely on VPS‑hosted nodes (where the IP isn’t their home address) and encrypt RPC channels back to a local wallet, sidestepping Tor entirely.