Breaking Down Bitcoin’s Resilience
Since its inception in 2009, the Bitcoin network has been operating without interruption. However, what it truly takes to disrupt this network remains somewhat elusive.
Recently, researchers from the Cambridge Center for Alternative Finance, alongside a longitudinal study, investigated over a decade of peer-to-peer network data, analyzing it against 68 confirmed submarine cable failure incidents to assess how resilient Bitcoin is to real-world infrastructure challenges.
The findings were striking: for Bitcoin to face significant disruptions, about 72% to 92% of undersea cables connecting different countries would need to fail simultaneously.
In light of recent disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz and ongoing concerns about infrastructure vulnerabilities, this study serves as a crucial benchmark. It reveals how remarkably robust Bitcoin is against such threats.
Instead of crumbling, the network appears to degrade gradually. The researchers conducted 1,000 Monte Carlo simulations and found that random cable failures had minimal impacts.
In fact, over 87% of the cable failure events they looked at had less than a 5% effect on Bitcoin nodes. One notable incident was in March 2024 when multiple cables off the coast of Ivory Coast were damaged, affecting nearly half of the regional nodes. However, globally, only five to seven Bitcoin nodes were disrupted—around 0.03% of the entire network.
Interestingly, there was almost no correlation between cable failures and Bitcoin prices, sitting at a low -0.02. This suggests that daily price fluctuations are largely unaffected by infrastructure disruptions.
Another key takeaway from this research is the stark difference in vulnerability between random failures and targeted attacks.
While a random failure requires a significant portion of cables to be removed to inflict damage, a targeted approach aimed at the most crucial cables—those that act as intercontinental chokepoints—can achieve similar effects with only a 20% loss. Attacking the leading five hosting providers, like Amazon and Google Cloud, requires even less, around 5%, to cause significant disruptions.
This presents a distinctly different threat landscape. Random failures are, well, random, but targeted attacks are more deliberate and calculated. This study highlights two types of adversaries: one that Bitcoin can withstand and another that poses a more genuine risk.
Shifting Threats Over Time
This research also traces the evolving resilience of Bitcoin, noting that it hasn’t always been a straightforward progression. In fact, from 2014 to 2017, Bitcoin showed its greatest resilience due to a geographically diverse network, with critical failure thresholds around 0.90 to 0.92.
However, as the network expanded rapidly yet became more geographically concentrated, resilience dropped sharply from 2018 to 2021, hitting a low of 0.72 in 2021 during a peak in mining concentration in East Asia. The mining ban in China in 2021 reshuffled the landscape, allowing some recovery to 0.88 in 2022, but projections for 2025 suggest a settling around 0.78.
The introduction of TOR has complicated conventional wisdom. By 2025, 64% of Bitcoin nodes were using TOR, rendering their physical locations harder to track.
It was presumed that this obscurity might hide vulnerabilities, but if TOR nodes are concentrated, it could signify weakness. However, the Cambridge team created a four-layer model that actually showed the opposite—a concentration in countries like Germany, France, and the Netherlands, known for their extensive undersea cables, makes disruption difficult.
This concept, termed “adaptive self-organization,” indicates a response to previous censorship incidents. With the Bitcoin community transitioning towards censorship-resistant infrastructures, the network is less vulnerable to physical threats.
Given the ongoing turmoil in regions like the Middle East—especially with the Strait of Hormuz closed—the implications of potential damage to undersea cables take on real significance.
The research suggests that the most likely scenario is that Bitcoin remains unaffected, unless there is a deliberate attack on crucial cables or hosting providers.
