Cambridge study: Bitcoin can withstand the collapse of over 72% of the world's submarine cables, but targeted attacks on the five major custody providers could paralyze the network.

According to ME News, on March 14th (UTC+8), the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance released a longitudinal study on the resilience of the Bitcoin network's 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 transnational submarine cables globally would need to fail simultaneously for the Bitcoin network to experience significant node disconnections. Based on 1000 Monte Carlo simulations per scenario, over 87% of real-world failure events had an impact of less than 5% on nodes, and the correlation coefficient between cable failures and Bitcoin prices was close to zero (-0.02). The study also reveals a significant asymmetry between random failures and targeted attacks: if an attacker targets critical hub cables, the damage threshold drops drastically to 20%; if a targeted attack targets the five hosting providers with the most nodes—Hetzner, OVH, Comcast, Amazon, and Google Cloud—only 5% of their routing capacity needs to be removed to cause the same impact. (Source: ME)