A new 11-year study from researchers Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance reveals something remarkable about Bitcoin’s infrastructure: the network is extremely resilient to physical internet disruptions.

The research analyzed 11 years of peer-to-peer network data, 658 global undersea cables, and 68 real cable outage incidents.

🌐 Key Finding

Between 72% and 92% of the world’s undersea cables would need to fail at the same time to significantly disrupt the Bitcoin network.

That means random outages from ship anchors, earthquakes, or accidents are very unlikely to stop Bitcoin.

📊 What Real Data Shows

Researchers ran 1,000 Monte Carlo simulations and compared them with real outages.

87% of cable failures affected less than 5% of Bitcoin nodes

The biggest incident occurred in March 2024 near Côte d’Ivoire, when 7–8 cables were cut

Even then, only 5–7 nodes were affected globally — about 0.03% of the network

The correlation between cable outages and Bitcoin’s price was -0.02 (essentially zero)

In simple terms: Bitcoin barely notices cable disruptions.

🎯 The Real Risk: Centralized Hosting

However, the study found a different type of vulnerability.

If attackers target the five hosting providers that run a large share of Bitcoin nodes, the impact could be much bigger:

Hetzner

OVHcloud

Comcast

Amazon Web Services

Google Cloud

Removing just ~5% of routing capacity from these providers could cause a disruption similar to losing most global cables.

🕵️ The Role of Tor

By 2025, around 64% of Bitcoin nodes are expected to route through the Tor network.

Many assumed Tor could hide infrastructure risks, but the research showed something surprising:

Tor relays are highly concentrated in Western Europe, especially in:

Germany

France

Netherlands

These regions actually have strong internet redundancy, which slightly increases Bitcoin’s resilience rather than weakening it.

📉 Network Resilience Over Time

Bitcoin’s infrastructure strength has shifted over the years:

2018–2021: resilience dropped due to mining concentration in East Asia

2021: resilience index hit 0.72

After China’s mining ban, miners spread globally

2022: resilience recovered to 0.88

2025: stabilizing around 0.78

⚠️ Why This Matters

The study highlights two very different threat models:

1️⃣ Random infrastructure damage (anchors, earthquakes, accidents)

→ Almost no realistic risk to Bitcoin

2️⃣ Coordinated attacks on hosting providers

→ Could create serious network disruption

In other words, Bitcoin is highly resistant to chaos — but less prepared for targeted infrastructure attacks.