72% of subsea cables need to fail to impact Bitcoin, study shows

Nearly three-quarters of each undersea fibre optic net cables (which transportation astir 99% of planetary net traffic) would request to neglect to person a important interaction connected Bitcoin, according to a survey released earlier this year.

In probe archetypal published successful February and past revised connected March 12, researchers Wenbin Wu and Alexander Neumueller from the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance said they utilized P2P web information from 2014 to 2025 and 68 verified cablegram responsibility events to use a country-level cascade exemplary to find Bitcoin’s carnal infrastructure resilience.

They assertion it to beryllium the archetypal longitudinal survey of Bitcoin’s resilience to submarine cablegram failures, and it helps to reply a long-standing question astir what would hap to Bitcoin if the net were to beryllium disrupted. 

Map of undersea cables. Source: SubmarineCableMap 

The researchers recovered that the captious nonaccomplishment threshold for random cablegram removal sits astatine 0.72 to 0.92, meaning 72% to 92% of each “inter-country” submarine cables would request to neglect earlier much than 10% of web nodes disconnect. 

However, the Bitcoin web was much susceptible to targeted attacks connected definite subsea cablegram chokepoints, with researchers calling it an “order of magnitude much effective,” with a captious nonaccomplishment threshold of 0.05 to 0.20.

Tor routing provides greater resilience 

The survey besides recovered that Tor (The Onion Router) “creates a compound obstruction to disruption,” fixed the existent attraction of relay infrastructure successful well-connected European countries.

Tor is akin to VPNs (virtual backstage networks), bouncing web postulation done a concatenation of volunteer-run servers astir the world, wrapping each hop successful a furniture of encryption for privacy, similar the layers of an onion.

Related: Is Tor inactive harmless aft Germany’s ‘timing attack?’ Answer: It’s complicated...

The Bitcoin web uses Tor to obfuscate nodes, meaning their carnal locations are hidden. The insubstantial revealed that 64% of Bitcoin nodes are fundamentally “invisible” to researchers.

“Tor adoption increases resilience nether existent relay geography alternatively than introducing hidden fragility,” it stated. 

This is due to the fact that Tor relay infrastructure is concentrated successful Germany, France, and the Netherlands — countries with extended and redundant submarine cablegram connectivity — truthful cablegram failures seldom instrumentality down relay capacity.

Bitcoin web resilience has been improving with Tor adoption implicit time: Source: Wenbin Wu and Alexander Neumueller

Near-zero correlation betwixt cablegram events and BTC price

The researchers concluded that 87% of the 68 verified humanities cablegram responsibility events caused little than a 5% node impact, and cablegram events showed fundamentally zero correlation with Bitcoin (BTC) prices, oregon a statistically insignificant correlation coefficient of −0.02.