Bitcoin would experience graceful degradation rather than collapse, as random failures would need an exceptionally high rate of inter-country submarine cable outages—between 72% and 92%—before significant disruption occurs.

Over the past decade, resilience rose to a peak between 2014 and 2017, fell during 2018–2021 due to mining concentration, and rebounded to a robust 0.78 by 2025, underscoring the network’s adaptive self-organization.

TOR-based anonymity contributes to resilience, with roughly two-thirds of Bitcoin nodes using TOR as of 2025, and a relay footprint concentrated in Germany, France, and the Netherlands, complicating coordinated disruptions.

There is a notable asymmetry: a targeted attack on high-betweenness cables could drop the critical failure threshold to 20%, and striking the top five hosting providers (Hetzner, OVH, Comcast, Amazon, Google Cloud) might achieve similar impacts with only about 5% of routing capacity removed.

The findings sit against a backdrop of ongoing global infrastructure vulnerabilities—such as Hormuz-related risks and regional conflicts—but suggest Bitcoin would likely continue to function under many disruption scenarios.

The largest real-world disruption in the dataset affected only about 0.03% of global nodes, highlighting Bitcoin’s robustness to random failures.

The study from the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance spans 11 years and 68 verified submarine cable fault events to evaluate Bitcoin’s vulnerability to physical infrastructure disruption.

Overall implication: random outages pose less risk for Bitcoin, while the credible threats focus on deliberate, state-like actions targeting critical cables and major hosting providers.