Research indicates that the Bitcoin network exhibits remarkable resilience in the face of global submarine communication cable disruptions. A long-term study led by Wenbin Wu and Alexander Neumueller of the University of Cambridge analyzed data from over eight million nodes and historical failure records of 658 submarine cables, finding that only 68 out of 385 cable failures had a slight impact on the Bitcoin network. This suggests that damage to single points of physical infrastructure is unlikely to shake the overall operation of Bitcoin.
The real potential threat does not come from the submarine cables themselves, but rather from critical links in network routing. The study points out that Bitcoin's stability relies on three pillars: submarine cables, Autonomous System (AS) routing architecture, and peer-to-peer communication protocols. To cause a significant disruption, 72% to 92% of submarine cables would need to be simultaneously paralyzed—an extremely low probability. In contrast, a targeted attack on 5% of the bandwidth resources of major global cloud service providers such as Hetzner or Google Cloud could trigger more widespread connectivity issues.
Bitcoin's decentralized nature further enhances its risk resistance. Since 2021, the usage rate of the Tor network in Bitcoin nodes has increased significantly from 23% to 63%. This increase is closely related to events such as internet shutdowns in Iran and the Chinese mining ban. Tor not only protects user privacy but also provides an alternative communication path when traditional networks are disrupted, becoming an important guarantee of network resilience.
With the implementation of the Chinese mining ban, the global Bitcoin mining layout has undergone structural changes, gradually spreading from a high concentration in East Asia to North America, Europe, Central Asia, and other regions. This geographical dispersion significantly reduces the impact of regional power outages or policy interventions on the entire network.
Nevertheless, reliance on centralized cloud services still poses a potential risk. Large-scale service disruptions at giants like Amazon and Microsoft could have a far greater impact than physical cable failures. To this end, teams like Blockstream have deployed satellite communication networks as supplementary channels to terrestrial networks, ensuring that Bitcoin can maintain basic broadcasting and synchronization capabilities even in extreme situations.
Overall, Bitcoin, with its distributed architecture, protocol-layer innovation, and global node dispersion, has successfully resisted the vulnerabilities commonly faced by traditional internet infrastructure, demonstrating a level of survivability that surpasses conventional network systems.