A paper published on arXiv in February by Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance researchers Wenbin Wu and Alexander Neumueller presents the first longitudinal study of Bitcoin's physical infrastructure resilience, covering 11 years of peer-to-peer network data, 658 submarine cables, and 68 verified cable fault events.
The headline finding: between 72% and 92% of the world's inter-country submarine cables would need to fail simultaneously before Bitcoin (BTC) suffers significant node disconnection.
A targeted attack on five major hosting providers, however, could achieve similar disruption by removing just 5% of routing capacity.
The paper arrives as submarine cable sabotage has drawn heightened geopolitical attention, with the Strait of Hormuz disrupted and infrastructure attacks increasingly common in contested regions.
What the Data Shows
The researchers ran 1,000 Monte Carlo simulations per scenario across the full dataset. Of the 68 real-world cable fault events studied, 87% caused less than 5% node impact.
The largest single event - when seabed disturbances off Côte d'Ivoire severed seven to eight cables simultaneously in March 2024 - affected only five to seven Bitcoin nodes globally, roughly 0.03% of the network.
The correlation between cable failures and Bitcoin's price was -0.02, effectively zero. The asymmetry becomes stark when the attack model shifts from random to targeted.
While random cable removal requires a 72–92% threshold to cause fragmentation, targeting cables with the highest betweenness centrality - those serving as continental chokepoints - drops that threshold to 20%. Targeting just five hosting providers (Hetzner, OVH, Comcast, Amazon, and Google Cloud) by node count reduces it further to 5%.
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The Tor Finding
As of 2025, 64% of Bitcoin nodes route through Tor, making their physical locations unobservable. The assumption had been that hidden locations might conceal fragility.
The study found the opposite. Tor relay infrastructure is concentrated in Germany, France, and the Netherlands - countries with the densest submarine cable redundancy and the most robust terrestrial fiber connections. The four-layer multiplex model the researchers built showed Tor adding between 0.02 and 0.10 to the critical failure threshold, not subtracting from it.
Network resilience declined 22% between 2018 and 2021 as geographic concentration peaked during the East Asian mining boom, hitting a low of 0.72 in 2021. China's mining ban forced redistribution; the threshold recovered to 0.88 by 2022 before settling at 0.78 in 2025.
Why It Matters
The research establishes a quantitative framework for two categorically different threat models.
Random infrastructure failures - from ship anchors, earthquakes, or conflict - present negligible risk to Bitcoin's operational continuity at any realistic scale.
Coordinated, state-level targeting of specific hosting chokepoints is a structurally different adversary, and one the network's topology is considerably less equipped to resist.
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