Research: 72% of Submarine Fiber Optic Cables Would Need to Fail Simultaneously to Significantly Impact Bitcoin Network

Crypto Mars News: On March 16, a recent study showed that the Bitcoin network is highly resilient to global internet infrastructure failures. The research found that only when approximately 72% to 92% of transoceanic submarine cables fail simultaneously does more than 10% of Bitcoin nodes go offline, significantly impacting the network. The study was conducted by researchers Wenbin Wu and Alexander Neumueller from the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance, based on Bitcoin P2P network data from 2014–2025 and 68 verified submarine cable failure events. They built a national-level cascade model to assess the resilience of Bitcoin infrastructure. Results indicate that under random cable failure scenarios, the Bitcoin network has high fault tolerance. However, targeted attacks on critical submarine cable “bottleneck points” could increase impact efficiency by an order of magnitude, lowering the critical failure threshold to 5%–20%. The study also highlights that the use of the anonymous network Tor (The Onion Router) significantly enhances Bitcoin network resilience. Currently, about 64% of Bitcoin nodes hide their real locations via Tor, making them “invisible” in the physical network. Since Tor relay nodes are mainly concentrated in countries like Germany, France, and the Netherlands, where submarine cable connections are dense and redundant, even partial cable failures are unlikely to affect overall relay capacity. Additionally, the research found that in the 68 historical submarine cable failure events, 87% had less than 5% impact on Bitcoin nodes. These events are almost uncorrelated with Bitcoin price movements, with a statistical correlation coefficient of only -0.02. The study also notes that although Bitcoin’s hash rate distribution has changed geographically, network resilience is primarily determined by the topology of global submarine cables rather than hash rate distribution.