A new study from the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance suggests the physical infrastructure underpinning Bitcoin is more resilient than many assume, with the increasing use of Tor helping strengthen the system against disruptions.
Although Bitcoin has operated continuously since 2009, there has been limited empirical research on how real-world infrastructure failures could affect the network. To address that gap, Cambridge researchers conducted the first long-term analysis of Bitcoin’s resilience to physical connectivity disruptions.
The team examined 11 years of peer-to-peer network data alongside 68 verified submarine cable fault events around the world. Their findings suggest that between 72% and 92% of global inter-country submarine cables would need to fail at the same time before the Bitcoin network experiences significant node disconnections.
With infrastructure risks gaining attention amid disruptions affecting key maritime routes such as the Strait of Hormuz, the study offers one of the first data-driven estimates of how difficult it would be to take Bitcoin offline.
Random cable failures have minimal impact
The results show the network tends to weaken gradually rather than fail suddenly when infrastructure problems occur.
Researchers conducted 1,000 Monte Carlo simulations across various scenarios and found that most random cable failures had little effect on Bitcoin’s connectivity. In fact, more than 87% of the 68 real-world cable incidents studied affected fewer than 5% of nodes.
The most severe disruption took place in March 2024 when seabed disturbances near Côte d’Ivoire damaged seven to eight submarine cables simultaneously. While roughly 43% of nodes in the region were temporarily affected, the impact on the global Bitcoin network was minimal, with only five to seven nodes disrupted — around 0.03% of the total network.
The researchers also found almost no statistical relationship between cable failures and Bitcoin’s market price, with a correlation of about -0.02, suggesting infrastructure outages are largely invisible compared with normal market volatility.
Targeted attacks present a different scenario
While random disruptions appear unlikely to seriously affect Bitcoin, the study highlights a far lower threshold for targeted attacks.
If an adversary were to deliberately disrupt cables with the highest “betweenness centrality”—the key links connecting major regions of the global internet—the failure threshold could fall to around 20% of cables.
The research also identifies concentration risks among hosting providers. Disrupting the five largest node-hosting services — Hetzner, OVH, Comcast, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud — could generate comparable disruption with the removal of only 5% of routing capacity.
This highlights two very different threat models. Natural events such as cable faults pose limited risk to Bitcoin’s operations, while coordinated attacks targeting infrastructure providers or strategic cable routes could represent a more serious challenge.
Network resilience has changed over time
The researchers also tracked how Bitcoin’s resilience has evolved.
The network appeared strongest between 2014 and 2017, when nodes were widely distributed geographically and the critical failure threshold was about 0.90–0.92.
Resilience weakened between 2018 and 2021 as the network expanded rapidly but became more geographically concentrated, particularly during the peak of mining activity in East Asia. During that period the threshold dropped to roughly 0.72 in 2021.
After the mining crackdown in China forced miners and nodes to relocate globally, resilience improved again. The threshold climbed to around 0.88 in 2022 before stabilizing near 0.78 by 2025.
Tor adoption improves resilience
One of the study’s most notable findings involves the growing role of Tor within Bitcoin’s network.
By 2025, about 64% of Bitcoin nodes were operating through Tor, making their physical location difficult to identify.
Some observers previously believed that hidden node locations might conceal geographic concentration and increase vulnerability. However, the researchers’ four-layer network model suggested the opposite.
Tor relay infrastructure is concentrated in highly connected European countries such as Germany, France and Netherlands — regions with dense submarine cable networks and extensive cross-border connectivity.
Because these locations are particularly difficult to isolate from global internet infrastructure, attempts to disrupt Tor connectivity by cutting submarine cables become far more complicated. The study found Tor increased the network’s resilience threshold by 0.02 to 0.10 compared with a network relying only on standard internet connections.
Researchers described this phenomenon as “adaptive self-organization.”
Tor adoption accelerated following major censorship events, including the 2019 Iranian Internet shutdown, the 2021 Myanmar coup and China’s mining ban.
Without centralized coordination, the Bitcoin ecosystem gradually moved toward more censorship-resistant infrastructure — a shift that also made the network physically harder to disrupt.
With geopolitical tensions and infrastructure vulnerabilities increasing around key transit routes like the Strait of Hormuz, concerns about the impact of submarine cable damage on digital systems have grown.
However, the study indicates that Bitcoin would likely continue operating through most disruptions unless attackers deliberately targeted the specific cables and hosting providers that serve as critical global bottlenecks.
