Research: 72% of Undersea Cables Would Need to Fail Simultaneously to Significantly Affect the Bitcoin Network

BlockBeats News, March 16th, a new study shows that the Bitcoin network exhibits strong resilience to global internet infrastructure failures. The study found that it would require approximately 72% to 92% of simultaneous international submarine cable failures to cause over 10% of Bitcoin nodes to go offline, significantly impacting the network.

This study, conducted by researchers Wenbin Wu and Alexander Neumueller from the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance, is based on 2014–2025 Bitcoin P2P network data and 68 verified submarine cable failure events. They constructed a national-level cascading model to assess Bitcoin infrastructure's shock resistance.

The results indicate that under random submarine cable failure scenarios, the Bitcoin network demonstrates high fault tolerance. However, if targeted attacks on key submarine cable "chokepoints" are carried out, the impact efficiency could increase by an order of magnitude, potentially lowering the critical failure threshold to 5%–20%.

The study also highlights that the use of the Tor (The Onion Router) anonymous network significantly enhances Bitcoin network's anti-interference capabilities. Currently, about 64% of Bitcoin nodes conceal their real locations through Tor, making them "invisible" in the physical network. As Tor relay nodes are mainly concentrated in countries with dense submarine cable connections and high redundancy such as Germany, France, and the Netherlands, even with partial cable failures, it is difficult to impact the overall relay capacity.

Furthermore, the study found that in the historical 68 submarine cable failure events, 87% had an impact on Bitcoin nodes of less than 5%. These events showed almost no correlation with Bitcoin prices, with a statistical correlation coefficient of only -0.02. The research also points out that despite changes in Bitcoin mining distribution, network resilience is still mainly determined by the global submarine cable topology rather than mining distribution.