Bitcoin's Physical Infrastructure Proved Resilient in Study of Submarine Cable Failures
Researchers from the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance have published a study on Bitcoin's physical infrastructure resilience, examining the impact of submarine cable failures on the network. The study analyzed 11 years of peer-to-peer network data and found that between 72% and 92% of the world's inter-country submarine cables would need to fail simultaneously before Bitcoin suffers significant node disconnection.
However, a targeted attack on five major hosting providers - Hetzner, OVH, Comcast, Amazon, and Google Cloud - could achieve similar disruption by removing just 5% of routing capacity. The study used Monte Carlo simulations to model the impact of cable failures and found that random removals have a negligible effect on Bitcoin's operational continuity.
The research also examined the role of Tor relay infrastructure in protecting Bitcoin nodes from physical location-based attacks. Contrary to expectations, the study found that Tor relay infrastructure is concentrated in countries with dense submarine cable redundancy and robust terrestrial fiber connections, which actually increases the critical failure threshold.