A new study from the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance finds that the infrastructure supporting Bitcoin is more resilient than previously believed, with increased adoption of Tor helping strengthen the system against potential disruptions.

Although Bitcoin has operated continuously since its launch in 2009, there has been little detailed research examining how physical infrastructure failures—such as damaged submarine cables—could affect the network. To explore that question, Cambridge researchers analyzed 11 years of peer-to-peer network data alongside 68 confirmed submarine cable faults worldwide.

Their findings suggest that between 72% and 92% of global inter-country submarine cables would need to fail simultaneously before Bitcoin begins experiencing significant node disconnections.

With infrastructure vulnerabilities increasingly in focus—particularly amid disruptions affecting key maritime routes such as the Strait of Hormuz—the research offers one of the first empirical benchmarks for how difficult it would be to take the Bitcoin network offline.

Random disruptions have limited impact

The results show that Bitcoin’s network tends to degrade gradually rather than collapse when connectivity issues occur.

Researchers ran 1,000 Monte Carlo simulations across various scenarios and found that random cable outages typically had minimal impact. More than 87% of the 68 real-world cable failures studied disrupted fewer than 5% of Bitcoin nodes.

The most severe incident occurred in March 2024, when seabed disturbances near Côte d’Ivoire damaged seven to eight submarine cables at once. While about 43% of nodes in the affected region went offline, the global Bitcoin network experienced only minor disruption, with five to seven nodes affected—roughly 0.03% of the network.

Researchers also observed virtually no correlation between cable outages and Bitcoin’s market price, with a statistical relationship of about -0.02, suggesting infrastructure failures are largely overshadowed by routine market volatility.

Targeted attacks could pose greater risks

While random failures appear unlikely to significantly affect Bitcoin, the study identifies a much lower threshold for targeted disruptions.

If an adversary deliberately attacked submarine cables with the highest “betweenness centrality”—those serving as key connectivity bridges between continents—the failure threshold could fall to around 20% of cables.

The study also points to concentration risks within hosting infrastructure. Targeting the five largest hosting providers that support Bitcoin nodes—Hetzner, OVH, Comcast, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud—could generate comparable disruption by removing only 5% of routing capacity.

This difference highlights two distinct threat models. Natural infrastructure failures present relatively limited risk, while coordinated actions targeting key infrastructure providers or major cable routes could pose a more serious challenge.

Network resilience has evolved

The research also examined how Bitcoin’s resilience has changed over time.

Between 2014 and 2017 the network was at its most resilient, when nodes were widely distributed across different regions and the critical failure threshold stood around 0.90–0.92.

Resilience declined between 2018 and 2021 as the network expanded quickly but became more geographically concentrated, particularly during the peak of mining activity in East Asia. The threshold dropped to around 0.72 in 2021.

After a sweeping mining crackdown in China forced miners and nodes to relocate globally, the network became more geographically dispersed. Resilience recovered to roughly 0.88 in 2022 before stabilizing at around 0.78 by 2025.

Tor strengthens the network

One of the study’s most notable conclusions involves the growing role of Tor within the Bitcoin ecosystem.

By 2025, approximately 64% of Bitcoin nodes were operating through Tor, making their physical locations difficult to determine.

Some analysts had previously speculated that this lack of visibility might conceal geographic concentration and increase vulnerability. However, the researchers’ four-layer network model suggested the opposite.

Tor relay infrastructure is concentrated in well-connected European countries such as Germany, France and Netherlands—regions with dense submarine cable networks and strong cross-border connectivity.

Because these areas are difficult to isolate from the global internet, attempts to disrupt Tor connectivity through cable cuts would face significant logistical challenges. The study found Tor increased Bitcoin’s resilience threshold by 0.02 to 0.10 compared with a network operating solely through standard internet connections.

Researchers described the shift as a form of “adaptive self-organization.”

Tor adoption accelerated following major censorship events such as the 2019 Iranian Internet shutdown, the 2021 Myanmar coup and China’s mining ban.

Without centralized coordination, the Bitcoin community gradually moved toward more censorship-resistant infrastructure—changes that also made the network physically harder to disrupt.

As geopolitical tensions and infrastructure risks increase around major global transit routes like the Strait of Hormuz, questions about how submarine cable damage could affect digital networks are becoming more relevant.

However, the study suggests Bitcoin would likely continue operating through most disruptions unless attackers deliberately targeted the specific cables and hosting providers that act as key global chokepoints.