Qubic failed to 51% attack Monero, but Dogecoin is next
Last week, Qubic’s claims of a 51% attack on the Monero blockchain sent shockwaves through the cryptosphere. Was the network underpinning the $5 billion privacy coin compromised?
Ultimately, it appears that the claims were somewhat overplayed; even Qubic’s founder has admitted as much.
However, undeterred, the community has now set its sights on a new target: Elon Musk’s favorite, Dogecoin.
Read more: ‘Please, do not resist’: Qubic hash grab worries Monero maxis
51% or 34% attack?
With some doubts surrounding the credibility of the 51% figure, Protos, amongst others, looked into Qubic’s claims of dominating the total hashrate on Monero. “It was a takeover and demonstration” of the project’s “outsourced computation capability,” an administrator of Qubic’s Telegram community told Protos at the time.
Since then, deeper analyses have shown the 51% claim to have been an exaggeration. An in-depth “Minority Report” analysis by Shai Wyborski, commissioned by Qubic, concluded that the real hashrate controlled by their pool was most likely between 28% and 35% of the total.
Additionally, an explainer by X user MEVEN also puts Qubic’s share of the Monero hashrate at approximately 2.5 of 6.5 GH/s, or just over a third.
As MEVEN explains, this figure is key to pulling off a “selfish mining” strategy “where a miner withholds their blocks and strategically releases them in order to invalidate honest blocks.” This allows a selfish miner to “momentarily appear to control 50% or more of the finalized chain blocks” with a far lower share of hashrate.
The selfish mining strategy, combined with “psychological game theory” can lead to the “illusion of dominance and pressure XMR miners into defecting [to Qubic’s pool].”
Wyborski noted that the “selfish mining” block manipulation carried out during the incident was textbook, and the screenshots shared on X “look like they were lifted from the literature.”
Following the analyses, even Qubic’s founder Sergey Ivancheglo (a.k.a. CFB) was forced to admit that the “Qubic pool didn’t have 51%+ share of the total hashrate,” and the 51% attack “should be rebranded into ‘34% attack.’”
Qubic considers attacking Dogecoin
With the Monero ‘attack’ widely being branded a publicity stunt, Qubic is keen to make more noise and attract more miners.
Given that the mechanism of selling-off mining profits in order to buy back QUBIC tokens is the key to offering a higher rate than traditional mining, a drop in hash power could lead to a collapse in QUBIC price, removing the incentive for miners to defect.
The community already has a new target, however, opting to switch to Dogecoin for “the following mining season.” Some are already hoping to “catch Elon’s attention somehow,” referring to Musk’s repeated clumsy signal-boosting of the meme-based crypto coin.
Read more: Was there a Monero 51% attack today?
Ivancheglo is keen that the switch is not seen as another ‘attack.’ He also stated that spinning up Dogecoin mining capabilities would take “months of development” and that Qubic would continue to mine Monero in the meantime.
Many hope that Monero has learned from the incident. Wyborski, despite calling himself “the most vocal, harsh, and obnoxious Qubic critic,” applauds what he sees as a “stress test.”
He concludes his report with “if they managed to cheat the system (not other users of the system, but the system itself), then the system is broken. Hate the game, not the player.”
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