Targeted Hosting Providers Pose Greater Risk to Bitcoin Than Submarine Cable Sabotage

A recent study by Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance researchers Wenbin Wu and Alexander Neumueller has shed light on Bitcoin's physical infrastructure resilience. The longitudinal study, published in February on arXiv, covered 11 years of peer-to-peer network data, 658 submarine cables, and 68 verified cable fault events.

The research found that between 72% and 92% of the world's inter-country submarine cables would need to fail simultaneously before Bitcoin (BTC) suffers significant node disconnection. However, a targeted attack on five major hosting providers could achieve similar disruption by removing just 5% of routing capacity.

The study analyzed 1,000 Monte Carlo simulations per scenario across the full dataset and found that the largest single event - when seabed disturbances off Côte d'Ivoire severed seven to eight cables simultaneously in March 2024 - affected only five to seven Bitcoin nodes globally, roughly 0.03% of the network.

The correlation between cable failures and Bitcoin's price was effectively zero, indicating that random infrastructure failures present negligible risk to Bitcoin's operational continuity at any realistic scale.