Cambridge study: Bitcoin can withstand the disconnection of less than 72% of global undersea cables, but targeted attacks on the top five custodians could paralyze the network

ChainCatcher news, according to CoinDesk, the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance has released a longitudinal study on the physical infrastructure resilience of the bitcoin network, covering 11 years of peer-to-peer network data and 68 verified submarine cable failure incidents.

The research shows that 72%~92% of global cross-border submarine cables would need to fail simultaneously for the bitcoin network to experience significant node disconnection. Based on 1,000 Monte Carlo simulations for each scenario, over 87% of actual failure events had less than 5% impact on nodes, and the correlation coefficient between cable failures and bitcoin price was nearly zero (-0.02). The study also reveals a significant asymmetry between random failures and targeted attacks: if attackers target key hub cables, the disruption threshold drops sharply to 20%; if targeted attacks are directed at the five largest custodial service providers by node count—Hetzner, OVH, Comcast, Amazon, and Google Cloud—removing just 5% of routing capacity can cause an equivalent impact.