Research: It takes 72% of submarine cables to fail simultaneously to significantly affect the Bitcoin network

BlockBeats news, on March 16, a new study showed that Bitcoin network has strong resilience to global Internet infrastructure failures. Research has found that approximately 72% to 92% of cross-border submarine cables fail simultaneously, leading to over 10% of Bitcoin nodes going offline and having a significant impact on the network. This study was conducted by Wenbin Wu and Alexander Neumueller, researchers from Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance. Based on Bitcoin P2P network data from 2014 to 2025 and 68 verified submarine cable failure events, a national cascade model was constructed to evaluate the impact resistance of Bitcoin infrastructure. The results show that in the context of random fiber optic cable failures, the Bitcoin network has high fault tolerance. However, if targeted attacks are carried out on key submarine cable bottlenecks, the efficiency will be increased by an order of magnitude, and the critical failure threshold may drop to 5% -20%. The study also pointed out that the use of the anonymous network Tor (The Onion Router) significantly enhances the anti-interference ability of the Bitcoin network. Currently, about 64% of Bitcoin nodes hide their true locations through Tor, making them "invisible" in the physical network. Due to the fact that Tor relay nodes are mainly concentrated in countries with dense submarine cable connections and high redundancy, such as Germany, France, and the Netherlands, even partial cable failures are difficult to affect the overall relay capability. In addition, research has found that out of 68 historical incidents of submarine cable failures, 87% had an impact on Bitcoin nodes that was less than 5%. These events have almost no correlation with the price of Bitcoin, with a statistical correlation coefficient of only -0.02. The study also pointed out that although the geographical distribution of Bitcoin computing power has changed, network resilience is mainly determined by the global submarine cable topology, rather than the distribution of computing power.