Bitcoin’s surprising resilience to physical infrastructure damage
I’ve been reading this Cambridge study, and honestly, it’s more interesting than I expected. The researchers looked at 11 years of Bitcoin network data against 68 real submarine cable faults. What they found was pretty surprising – Bitcoin can apparently handle 72% to 92% of the world’s submarine cables failing at once before things get really bad.
That’s a lot of cables. I mean, think about it – we’re talking about most of the physical connections between continents going down simultaneously. The network doesn’t just collapse. It degrades gradually, which is perhaps what you’d hope for in a decentralized system.
They ran thousands of simulations, and random cable failures barely made a dent. Over 87% of the actual cable faults they studied affected less than 5% of nodes. Even that big event off Côte d’Ivoire in March 2024, which damaged 7-8 cables at once, only knocked out about 0.03% of Bitcoin nodes globally.
The targeted attack vulnerability
Here’s where it gets concerning though. While random failures need massive scale to matter, targeted attacks are a different story. If someone knows what they’re doing and goes after the right cables – the ones that serve as chokepoints between continents – the threshold drops to just 20%.
But the real vulnerability isn’t even cables. It’s hosting providers. The study found that targeting just five hosting providers – Hetzner, OVH, Comcast, Amazon, and Google Cloud – requires removing only 5% of routing capacity to achieve significant impact.
That’s a completely different threat model. Random cable cuts are like natural disasters or accidents. But going after specific hosting providers? That’s something a state actor could do, or coordinated regulatory action. It makes you think about how centralized some aspects of the network might actually be.
How Bitcoin’s resilience has changed over time
The study tracked how this resilience evolved, and it wasn’t a straight line. Bitcoin was actually most resilient in its early years, from 2014 to 2017. Then things got worse during 2018-2021 as the network grew but concentrated geographically.
The lowest point was 2021, during that peak mining concentration in East Asia. The China mining ban forced redistribution, which helped recovery. But it’s interesting to see how network geography affects resilience.
The TOR surprise
This might be the most counterintuitive finding. About 64% of Bitcoin nodes use TOR as of 2025, which makes their physical location hard to determine. You’d think this might hide fragility – if all those TOR nodes were in one place, the network could be more vulnerable than it appears.
But the opposite seems true. TOR relay infrastructure is concentrated in Germany, France, and the Netherlands – countries with extensive submarine cable and land border connectivity. An attacker trying to disrupt TOR by cutting cables faces a compound problem because those countries are among the hardest to disconnect.
The researchers found TOR actually adds to network resilience. It’s like the Bitcoin community shifted toward censorship-resistant infrastructure without central coordination, and that shift happened to make the network physically harder to disrupt too.
With current tensions in places like the Strait of Hormuz, these questions aren’t just academic. The study suggests random cable damage probably won’t break Bitcoin. But targeted attacks on specific infrastructure? That’s a different story entirely. It makes you wonder about the balance between decentralization and practical network operation.
