I have often wondered if the internet is not so decentralized as we like to think and if that introduces single-point-of-failure like weaknesses to Bitcoin.
This paper seems to find that actually the internet infrastructure can get severely degraded and Bitcoin nodes don't lose much connectivity.
We present the first longitudinal study of Bitcoin's resilience to submarine cable failures, using 11 years of P2P network data (2014--2025) and 68 verified cable fault events.
"the vast majority of inter-country cables must fail before significant node disconnection.""the vast majority of inter-country cables must fail before significant node disconnection."
Because relay bandwidth concentrates in well-connected European countries, TOR adoption increases resilience under current relay geography
87% of historical cable faults caused less than 5% node impact.
I don't know how much if any of the credit for this goes to Core, but my impression is that Core has been highly interested in connectivity and the p2p network created by Bitcoin nodes. Great job!
This finding matches what Satoshi's design anticipated. Section 5 of the whitepaper describes a network that tolerates node failures naturally — nodes join and leave without breaking the chain, and the longest proof-of-work chain remains the truth regardless of connectivity gaps.
The key insight the paper seems to confirm: Bitcoin's P2P layer doesn't depend on CDNs, DNS resolvers, or any centralized chokepoint. Each node connects to 8+ peers by default across diverse paths. A submarine cable failure degrades some routes but the multi-hop topology routes around it.
Running a self-hosted node, this is exactly what you want to know. The network's resilience isn't theoretical — 11 years of real cable faults confirm the design holds.
The more interesting question is whether future UTXO set growth eventually creates an economic centralization pressure that matters more than physical topology for resilience.