A new study from the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance suggests that the infrastructure supporting Bitcoin is significantly more resilient than widely assumed, with the growing use of Tor helping strengthen the system’s ability to withstand disruptions.
Bitcoin has operated continuously since its launch in 2009, but until now there had been little empirical research examining how physical infrastructure failures could affect the network.
Researchers analyzed 11 years of peer-to-peer network data and compared it with 68 verified submarine cable fault events to assess the blockchain’s resilience to real-world infrastructure disruptions.
Their findings show that between 72% and 92% of global inter-country submarine cables would need to fail at the same time before Bitcoin begins to experience widespread node disconnections.
At a time when infrastructure risks are drawing greater attention — particularly amid disruptions affecting key global routes such as the Strait of Hormuz — the research provides one of the first data-driven benchmarks for how difficult it would be to shut down the Bitcoin network.
Random cable failures have minimal impact
The results indicate that Bitcoin’s network tends to degrade gradually rather than collapse under stress.
Using 1,000 Monte Carlo simulations for each scenario, researchers found that random cable outages typically had little effect. More than 87% of the 68 real-world incidents analyzed disrupted fewer than 5% of Bitcoin nodes.
The largest recorded event occurred in March 2024 when seabed disturbances near Côte d’Ivoire damaged seven to eight submarine cables simultaneously. Although about 43% of nodes in the affected region went offline, only five to seven nodes were impacted globally — roughly 0.03% of the network.
The researchers also observed almost no correlation between cable disruptions and Bitcoin’s market price, with a statistical relationship of about -0.02, indicating such incidents are largely overshadowed by normal price volatility.
Targeted attacks pose a greater threat
While random infrastructure failures appear unlikely to cause significant disruption, the study highlights a much lower threshold for targeted attacks.
If an adversary were to intentionally disrupt cables with the highest “betweenness centrality” — those acting as key connection points between continents — the failure threshold could fall to roughly 20% of cables.
The analysis also identified concentration risks within hosting infrastructure. Disrupting the five largest hosting providers supporting Bitcoin nodes — Hetzner, OVH, Comcast, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud — could produce comparable disruption by removing just 5% of global routing capacity.
This difference highlights two distinct risk scenarios. Natural failures such as cable breaks pose limited systemic risk, whereas coordinated state actions or regulatory shutdowns targeting infrastructure providers could present a more meaningful threat.
Network resilience has fluctuated
The study also tracked how Bitcoin’s resilience has evolved over time.
The network showed its strongest resilience between 2014 and 2017, when nodes were widely distributed geographically and the critical failure threshold was around 0.90–0.92.
Between 2018 and 2021, resilience weakened as mining and infrastructure became more geographically concentrated, particularly in East Asia. During this period, the threshold dropped to around 0.72 in 2021.
After China imposed a sweeping ban on crypto mining that year, miners and network infrastructure redistributed globally. Resilience subsequently improved to about 0.88 in 2022 before stabilizing near 0.78 by 2025.
Tor strengthens the network
One of the study’s more unexpected findings concerns the role of Tor in Bitcoin’s network architecture.
By 2025, roughly 64% of Bitcoin nodes were operating through Tor, which conceals their geographic location.
Some analysts had worried that hidden node locations might mask geographic concentration, potentially creating unseen vulnerabilities. However, the study’s multi-layer network model suggested the opposite.
Tor relay infrastructure is concentrated in highly connected European countries such as Germany, France and Netherlands — regions with extensive submarine cable networks and cross-border connectivity.
Because these locations are difficult to isolate, attempts to disrupt Tor connectivity through cable cuts would face significant logistical challenges. The researchers found that Tor increased the network’s resilience threshold by 0.02 to 0.10 compared with a standard clearnet-only configuration.
The study describes this evolution as a form of “adaptive self-organization.”
Tor adoption accelerated following censorship events such as the 2019 Iranian Internet shutdown, the 2021 Myanmar coup and China’s mining ban.
These shifts occurred organically within the Bitcoin ecosystem, without central coordination, yet they ultimately made the network more resistant to infrastructure disruptions.
With geopolitical tensions and infrastructure risks rising around major global transit routes like the Strait of Hormuz, concerns about submarine cable damage affecting digital networks have become more prominent.
However, the study suggests that Bitcoin would likely continue operating through most such disruptions unless attackers deliberately targeted the specific cables and hosting providers that function as critical global chokepoints.
