Cambridge Study: Bitcoin Network Resilient to 72% Subsea Cable Failures, But Targeted Attacks on Top 5 Hosting Providers Could Cause Collapse

According to CoinDesk, the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance has published a longitudinal study on the physical infrastructure resilience of the Bitcoin network, analyzing 11 years of peer-to-peer network data and 68 verified undersea cable failures. The study shows that Bitcoin’s network would experience significant node disconnections only if 72% to 92% of transnational undersea cables failed simultaneously. Based on 1,000 Monte Carlo simulations per scenario, more than 87% of real-world failures affected fewer than 5% of nodes, and the correlation between cable outages and Bitcoin price movements was nearly zero (-0.02). The study also reveals a significant asymmetry between random failures and targeted attacks: if an attacker targets critical hub cables, the failure threshold drops sharply to 20%; if targeting the five hosting providers with the highest number of nodes—Hetzner, OVH, Comcast, Amazon, and Google Cloud—removing just 5% of routing capacity would produce an equivalent impact.