Cambridge Research: Bitcoin can withstand a break in global undersea cables below 72%, but targeted attacks on the five major custodial service providers could lead to network paralysis

According to CoinDesk, the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance has released a longitudinal study on the resilience of Bitcoin's network physical infrastructure, covering 11 years of peer-to-peer network data and 68 verified submarine cable failure events.

The study shows that 72% to 92% of global multinational submarine cables need to fail simultaneously for significant node disconnections to occur in the Bitcoin network. Based on 1,000 Monte Carlo simulations for each scenario, over 87% of real failure events had less than a 5% impact on nodes, and the correlation coefficient between cable failures and Bitcoin prices is close to zero (-0.02). The study also reveals a significant asymmetry between random failures and directed attacks: if an attacker targets key hub cables, the destruction threshold will drop sharply to 20%; if directed attacks target the five largest hosting service providers—Hetzner, OVH, Comcast, Amazon, and Google Cloud—removing just 5% of routing capacity could cause a similar impact.