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

March 16 — A new study finds the Bitcoin network boasts strong resilience to global internet infrastructure failures. The research shows it would take roughly 72% to 92% of global submarine cables failing simultaneously to knock more than 10% of Bitcoin nodes offline, disrupting the network significantly. Led by researchers Wenbin Wu and Alexander Neumueller at the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance, the study draws on Bitcoin peer-to-peer (P2P) network data from 2014 to 2025 and 68 verified submarine cable outages. The team built a national-level cascading model to evaluate the Bitcoin network’s shock resilience. Results indicate the Bitcoin network has strong fault tolerance in random submarine cable outage scenarios. However, targeted attacks on critical submarine cable chokepoints could increase impact 10 times over, potentially cutting the critical outage threshold to 5-20%. The study also notes that using the Tor (The Onion Router) anonymous network drastically boosts the Bitcoin network’s ability to resist interference. Roughly 64% of Bitcoin nodes hide their real locations via Tor, rendering them invisible on the physical network. Tor relay nodes are mostly concentrated in countries with dense submarine cable networks and high redundancy—like Germany, France, and the Netherlands—so even partial outages rarely affect overall relay capacity. Additionally, the study found 87% of 68 historical submarine cable outages impacted fewer than 5% of Bitcoin nodes. These events had almost no correlation with Bitcoin prices, with a statistical correlation coefficient of just -0.02. Even as Bitcoin mining distribution has shifted, the network’s resilience still depends mostly on global submarine cable topology—not mining distribution.