Most distributed systems network models assume there is some kind of pre-established authenticated communication channel among a fixed set of participants, for example a PKI. Bitcoin is meant to work in a weaker model where there is no such assumption. Instead Bitcoin relies on a non-standard assumption about the allocation of computational resources - ignoring incentives for now, the assumption is that honest parties contribute more power in total than the adversary.
Some pre-established communication channel must still be assumed, just not an authenticated one. When formalizing Bitcoin things, I usually call it a "synchronous message diffusion" channel. Any honest party can publish a message, and that message is delivered to every other honest party within some time bound. A party that receives a message does not learn the identity of the sender (this essentially makes Sybil attacks possible). Additionally, the advers