Targeted Hostile Takeover Could Bring Down Bitcoin, Not Cable Sabotage

A recent study published by Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance researchers Wenbin Wu and Alexander Neumueller has found that Bitcoin's physical infrastructure is more resilient than previously thought. The study, which covered 11 years of peer-to-peer network data, 658 submarine cables, and 68 verified cable fault events, revealed 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, the study also found that a targeted attack on just five major hosting providers - Hetzner, OVH, Comcast, Amazon, and Google Cloud - could achieve similar disruption by removing as little as 5% of routing capacity. This is because these providers serve as critical chokepoints in the network.

The researchers ran 1,000 Monte Carlo simulations per scenario across the full dataset and found that random cable removal requires a high threshold to cause fragmentation. In contrast, targeting cables with the highest betweenness centrality - those serving as continental chokepoints - drops the threshold significantly.

Interestingly, the study also found that nodes routing through Tor, which are assumed to be hidden and therefore less vulnerable, are actually concentrated in countries with dense submarine cable redundancy and robust terrestrial fiber connections. This adds a new layer of complexity to the network's resilience.