You could cut almost every submarine cable on the planet and Bitcoin would still work.
An 11-year study just analyzed Bitcoin's resilience to submarine cable failures using 68 verified cable fault events from 2014 to 2025. Random cable failures would require roughly 72% to 92% of inter-country connections to go down before causing major node disconnection. Even targeted attacks on critical infrastructure still require 5% to 20% of key connections to be disrupted to have meaningful impact.
In practice, 87% of historical cable faults caused less than 5% node impact. The study also found that Tor usage actually increases Bitcoin's resilience since relay bandwidth is concentrated in well-connected regions.
Bitcoin's physical infrastructure resilience is wildly underappreciated.
An 11-year study just analyzed Bitcoin's resilience to submarine cable failures using 68 verified cable fault events from 2014 to 2025. Random cable failures would require roughly 72% to 92% of inter-country connections to go down before causing major node disconnection. Even targeted attacks on critical infrastructure still require 5% to 20% of key connections to be disrupted to have meaningful impact.
In practice, 87% of historical cable faults caused less than 5% node impact. The study also found that Tor usage actually increases Bitcoin's resilience since relay bandwidth is concentrated in well-connected regions.
Bitcoin's physical infrastructure resilience is wildly underappreciated.