Targeted Hosting Attacks Pose Greater Risk to Bitcoin than Submarine Cable Failures
A recent study by Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance researchers Wenbin Wu and Alexander Neumueller analyzed Bitcoin's physical infrastructure resilience over 11 years, covering peer-to-peer network data from 658 submarine cables.
The study 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 just five major hosting providers could achieve similar disruption by removing only 5% of routing capacity.
The researchers ran 1,000 Monte Carlo simulations per scenario and found that while random cable removal requires a high threshold to cause fragmentation, targeting cables with the highest betweenness centrality - those serving as continental chokepoints - drops that threshold significantly. Targeting just five hosting providers (Hetzner, OVH, Comcast, Amazon, and Google Cloud) by node count reduces it further to 5%.