Targeted Attack on Hosting Providers Could Disrupt Bitcoin Network

A new study by Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance researchers Wenbin Wu and Alexander Neumueller has found that cutting 72% to 92% of the world's submarine cables would not significantly impact Bitcoin's (BTC) network. However, targeting specific hosting providers could cause disruption.

The researchers analyzed 11 years of peer-to-peer network data, including 658 submarine cables and 68 verified cable fault events. They found that random cable failures had a negligible effect on the network, with only 87% causing less than 5% node impact.

In contrast, targeting hosting providers such as Hetzner, OVH, Comcast, Amazon, and Google Cloud could cause significant disruption by removing just 5% of routing capacity. The researchers found that targeting cables with high betweenness centrality - those serving as continental chokepoints - would require a threshold of only 20%, while targeting the named hosting providers would reduce this threshold to 5%.

The study also examined the use of Tor (The Onion Router) for Bitcoin nodes, finding that 64% of nodes route through it. However, the researchers found that Tor relay infrastructure is concentrated in countries with dense submarine cable redundancy and robust terrestrial fiber connections, effectively negating any potential fragility benefits.