72% of subsea cables need to fail to impact Bitcoin, study shows

The past 11 years have shown that Bitcoin has been resilient to random intercontinental subsea internet cable failures, but could be susceptible to targeted attacks.

Nearly three-quarters of all undersea fibre optic internet cables (which carry about 99% of international internet traffic) would need to fail to have a significant impact on Bitcoin, according to a study released earlier this year.

In research first published in February and last revised on March 12, researchers Wenbin Wu and Alexander Neumueller from the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance said they used P2P network data from 2014 to 2025 and 68 verified cable fault events to apply a country-level cascade model to determine Bitcoin’s physical infrastructure resilience.

They claim it to be the first longitudinal study of Bitcoin’s resilience to submarine cable failures, and it helps to answer a long-standing question about what would happen to Bitcoin if the internet were to be disrupted. 

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