Research: 72% of Submarine Fiber Optic Cables Would Need to Fail Simultaneously to Significantly Impact Bitcoin Network

Gate News: On March 16, a recent study shows that the Bitcoin network is highly resilient to global internet infrastructure failures. The research found that only when approximately 72% to 92% of transoceanic submarine cables fail simultaneously does more than 10% of Bitcoin nodes go offline, significantly impacting the network. The study was conducted by Wenbin Wu and Alexander Neumueller from the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance, based on Bitcoin P2P network data from 2014 to 2025 and 68 verified submarine cable failure events. They built a national-level cascade model to assess the resilience of Bitcoin infrastructure. Results indicate that under random cable failure scenarios, the Bitcoin network has high fault tolerance. However, targeted attacks on critical submarine cable “bottleneck points” can increase impact efficiency by an order of magnitude, reducing the critical failure threshold to 5%-20%. The study also highlights that the use of the Tor anonymous network significantly enhances Bitcoin’s anti-interference capabilities. Currently, about 64% of Bitcoin nodes hide their real locations via Tor, making them “invisible” in the physical network. Since Tor relay nodes are mainly concentrated in countries like Germany, France, and the Netherlands—where submarine cable connections are dense and redundant—even some cable failures are unlikely to affect overall relay capacity. Additionally, the study found that in 68 historical submarine cable failure events, 87% had less than a 5% impact on Bitcoin nodes. These events are almost uncorrelated with Bitcoin price movements, with a statistical correlation coefficient of only -0.02. The research also notes that although Bitcoin’s hash power distribution has changed geographically, network resilience is primarily determined by the topology of the global submarine cable network rather than hash power distribution.