A Cambridge study spanning 11 years and 68 verified submarine cable faults finds that Bitcoin’s physical infrastructure is far more resilient than previously understood, with TOR adoption strengthening the network. The study’s headline finding is that 72% to 92% of the world’s inter-country submarine cables would need to fail simultaneously before Bitcoin experiences significant node disconnection.
While random cable failures require 72-92% removal to cause damage, targeted attacks on the cables with the highest betweenness centrality drop that threshold to 20%. Targeting the top five hosting providers by node count—Hetzner, OVH, Comcast, Amazon, and Google Cloud—requires removing just 5% of routing capacity to achieve the same impact.
The TOR finding challenges conventional thinking: as of 2025, 64% of Bitcoin nodes use TOR, which keeps their locations unobservable, and a four-layer model shows TOR adds resilience. The study also notes that resilience has evolved over time, reflecting adaptive self-organization in response to censorship events. Overall, the researchers suggest that Bitcoin is unlikely to be knocked offline unless specific cables and hosting providers are deliberately targeted.
Leave a Reply