Research: 72% of submarine cables would need to fail simultaneously to significantly impact the bitcoin network

BlockBeats News, March 16 — A recent study shows that the bitcoin network demonstrates strong resilience against global internet infrastructure failures. The research found that only when about 72% to 92% of international submarine cables fail simultaneously would more than 10% of bitcoin nodes go offline, causing a significant impact on the network.

This study was conducted by Wenbin Wu and Alexander Neumueller from the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance. Based on bitcoin P2P network data from 2014–2025 and 68 verified submarine cable failure incidents, they constructed a national-level cascade model to assess the shock resistance of bitcoin infrastructure.

The results indicate that under random cable failure scenarios, the bitcoin network has high fault tolerance. However, if targeted attacks are carried out on critical submarine cable "bottleneck points," the impact efficiency increases by an order of magnitude, and the critical failure threshold may drop to 5%–20%.

The study also points out that the use of the anonymous network Tor (The Onion Router) significantly enhances the bitcoin network's resistance to interference. Currently, about 64% of bitcoin nodes use Tor to conceal their real locations, making them "invisible" in the physical network. Since Tor relay nodes are mainly concentrated in countries like Germany, France, and the Netherlands, where submarine cable connections are dense and redundancy is high, even partial cable failures are unlikely to affect overall relay capacity.

Additionally, the study found that among the 68 historical submarine cable failure incidents, 87% had less than a 5% impact on bitcoin nodes. These events have almost no correlation with bitcoin prices, with a statistical correlation coefficient of only −0.02. The research also notes that although the geographic distribution of bitcoin hash rate has changed, network resilience is still primarily determined by the global submarine cable topology rather than hash rate distribution.