TechFlow news: On March 14, according to CoinDesk, the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance released a longitudinal study on the physical infrastructure resilience of the Bitcoin network, covering 11 years of peer-to-peer network data and 68 verified undersea cable failure incidents.
The study shows that 72%–92% of global transnational undersea cables would need to fail simultaneously before the Bitcoin network experiences significant node disconnections. Based on 1,000 Monte Carlo simulations per scenario, over 87% of real-world failure events affected fewer than 5% of nodes, and the correlation coefficient between undersea cable failures and Bitcoin’s price is nearly zero (–0.02).
The study also reveals a marked asymmetry between random failures and targeted attacks: if an attacker targets critical hub cables, the disruption threshold drops sharply to 20%; if the attacker instead targets the top five hosting providers—Hetzner, OVH, Comcast, Amazon, and Google Cloud—accounting for the largest number of nodes, removing just 5% of routing capacity would produce equivalent impact.
