Research: 72% of submarine fiber optic cables would need to fail simultaneously for a significant impact on the Bitcoin network.

On March 16, a new study revealed that the Bitcoin network exhibits strong resilience to global internet infrastructure failures. The study found that it would take the simultaneous failure of approximately 72% to 92% of transnational submarine fiber optic cables to cause more than 10% of Bitcoin nodes to go offline, significantly impacting the network. This research, conducted by Wenbin Wu and Alexander Neumueller at the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance, used data from the Bitcoin P2P network from 2014 to 2025 and 68 verified submarine cable failure events to construct a national-level cascading model to assess the resilience of the Bitcoin infrastructure. The results show that the Bitcoin network has high fault tolerance under random cable failure scenarios. However, targeted attacks on critical submarine cable bottlenecks can increase the impact efficiency by an order of magnitude, potentially reducing the critical failure threshold to 5%–20%. The study also indicates that the use of the anonymous network Tor (The Onion Router) significantly enhances the Bitcoin network's resilience to interference. Currently, approximately 64% of Bitcoin nodes conceal their true location using Tor, making them "invisible" in the physical network. Since Tor relay nodes are primarily concentrated in countries with dense and redundant submarine cable connections, such as Germany, France, and the Netherlands, even partial cable failures are unlikely to affect overall relay capacity. Furthermore, the study found that in 68 historical submarine cable failures, 87% had an impact of less than 5% on Bitcoin nodes. These events showed almost no correlation with Bitcoin prices, with a statistical correlation coefficient of only -0.02. The study also points out that although the geographical distribution of Bitcoin's computing power has changed, network resilience is still primarily determined by the global submarine cable topology, rather than the distribution of computing power.