Bitcoin’s community has been working nonstop since 2009. The query no person had rigorously answered till now’s what it will truly take to interrupt it.
Researchers on the Cambridge Centre for Different Finance final week printed the primary longitudinal examine of Bitcoin blockchain’s resilience to bodily infrastructure disruption, analyzing 11 years of peer-to-peer community information towards 68 verified submarine cable fault occasions.
The headline discovering is that between 72% and 92% of the world’s inter-country submarine cables would wish to fail concurrently earlier than Bitcoin experiences important node disconnection.
In a world the place the Strait of Hormuz is at present disrupted and infrastructure vulnerability is entrance of thoughts, the examine supplies the primary empirical benchmark for the way exhausting Bitcoin truly is to knock offline.
The numbers inform a narrative of a community that degrades gracefully reasonably than collapsing catastrophically. The researchers ran 1,000 Monte Carlo simulations per situation throughout the complete dataset and located that random cable failures barely register.
Over 87% of the 68 real-world cable fault occasions they studied prompted lower than 5% node impression. The biggest single occasion, when seabed disturbances off Côte d’Ivoire broken 7-8 cables concurrently in March 2024, knocked out 43% of regional nodes however affected solely 5-7 bitcoin nodes globally, roughly 0.03% of the community.
The correlation between cable failures and bitcoin’s value was basically zero, at -0.02. Infrastructure disruptions are invisible towards every day value volatility.
However the paper’s most necessary discovering is the asymmetry between random and focused assaults.
Whereas random cable failures require 72-92% removing to trigger harm, a focused assault on the cables with the best betweenness centrality, those that function chokepoints between continents, drops that threshold to twenty%.
And concentrating on the highest 5 internet hosting suppliers by node rely, Hetzner, OVH, Comcast, Amazon, and Google Cloud, requires eradicating simply 5% of routing capability to attain the identical impression.
That is a basically totally different menace mannequin. Random failures are acts of nature. Focused assaults are acts of state, coordinated regulatory shutdowns of internet hosting suppliers or deliberate severing of vital cable routes. The examine basically maps two very totally different adversaries: one Bitcoin can simply survive, and one that is still a reputable threat.
How threats to bitcoin change over time
The paper tracks how resilience developed over time, and the trajectory is not a straight line. Bitcoin was most resilient in its early years from 2014-2017, when the community was geographically numerous and the vital failure threshold sat round 0.90-0.92.
Resilience declined sharply throughout 2018-2021 because the community grew quickly however concentrated geographically, hitting its lowest level of 0.72 in 2021 throughout peak mining focus in East Asia. The China mining ban in 2021 pressured redistribution, and resilience partially recovered to 0.88 in 2022 earlier than settling at 0.78 in 2025.
The TOR discovering is the one which challenges typical pondering. As of 2025, 64% of Bitcoin nodes use TOR, making their bodily location unobservable.
The belief has been that this lack of ability to watch may cover fragility, that if TOR nodes turned out to be geographically concentrated, the community may very well be extra weak than it seems.
The Cambridge researchers constructed a four-layer mannequin to check this and located the other. TOR relay infrastructure is closely concentrated in Germany, France, and the Netherlands, international locations with in depth submarine cable and land border connectivity.
An attacker attempting to disrupt TOR relay capability by reducing cables faces a compound drawback as a result of these international locations are among the many hardest to disconnect. The four-layer mannequin constantly confirmed increased resilience than the clearnet-only baseline, with TOR including between 0.02 and 0.10 to the vital failure threshold.
The paper frames this as “adaptive self-organization.” TOR adoption surged after censorship occasions like Iran’s web shutdown in 2019, the Myanmar coup in 2021, and the China mining ban.
The Bitcoin group shifted towards censorship-resistant infrastructure with none central coordination, and that shift occurred to additionally make the community bodily more durable to disrupt.
With the Strait of Hormuz successfully closed and a regional struggle disrupting infrastructure throughout the Center East, the query of what occurs to Bitcoin if submarine cables get broken is not theoretical.
The examine suggests the reply might be nothing, until somebody is intentionally concentrating on the particular cables and internet hosting suppliers that matter most.
