Submarine Cable Sabotage Won't Bring Down Bitcoin, But Targeted Hosting Attacks Could

A recent study by Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance researchers Wenbin Wu and Alexander Neumueller has found that cutting 72% of the world's submarine cables would not significantly disrupt Bitcoin's (BTC) operation. However, targeting specific hosting providers could achieve similar disruption with just a 5% reduction in routing capacity.

The study analyzed 11 years of peer-to-peer network data and 658 submarine cables, including 68 verified cable fault events. The researchers 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 remove just 5% of routing capacity, achieving similar disruption. The study suggests that random infrastructure failures present negligible risk to Bitcoin's operational continuity at any realistic scale.

The researchers also found that the Tor network, which accounts for 64% of Bitcoin nodes, does not provide additional resilience. Instead, it adds between 0.02 and 0.10 to the critical failure threshold, making it less robust against targeted attacks.