Practically three-quarters of undersea fiber-optic web cables would want to fail earlier than Bitcoin sees main disruption, in response to a Cambridge Centre for Various Finance research launched this 12 months.
In a paper first printed in February and revised March 12, researchers Wenbin Wu and Alexander Neumueller analyzed Bitcoin P2P community information from 2014 to 2025 alongside 68 verified subsea cable fault occasions.
How a lot cable failure issues
The researchers estimated a crucial threshold of 0.72 to 0.92 for random cable elimination.
This suggests 72% to 92% of “inter-country” submarine cables must fail earlier than greater than 10% of Bitcoin nodes disconnect.
Additionally they discovered the community is extra uncovered to focused disruption of particular cable chokepoints.
The research described focused assaults as “an order of magnitude simpler,” with a crucial failure threshold of 0.05 to 0.20.
Tor and “invisible” nodes
The paper mentioned Tor routing “creates a compound barrier to disruption,” citing relay infrastructure concentrated in well-connected European nations.
The research acknowledged:
“Tor adoption will increase resilience beneath present relay geography relatively than introducing hidden fragility.”
It additionally reported that 64% of Bitcoin nodes are successfully “invisible” to researchers as a result of Tor obfuscation.
Value impression and mining geography
The researchers concluded 87% of the 68 historic cable occasions produced lower than a 5% node impression.
Additionally they discovered near-zero correlation between cable occasions and bitcoin’s worth, reporting a statistically insignificant correlation coefficient of −0.02.
The paper added that geographic diversification of mining “has not materially altered infrastructure resilience,” which it mentioned is pushed extra by bodily cable topology than by hashrate distribution.