Thank you for the insightful comments, I have learned a lot. I sincerely find this matter can be both significant and trivial; insiders see the nuances while outsiders just watch the excitement. Here are a few additional points:
1) I noticed that overseas influencers are using this incident to FUD Bitcoin, reasoning that the current mining pool hash rate distribution shows that the top two mining pools, Foundry USA (33.6%) and AntPool (17.9%), together exceed 51%. Thus, they draw a crude conclusion that if these two mining pools collude, Bitcoin is doomed. This is a typical case of outsiders misinterpreting the situation because they overlook two points:
The combined 51% share of two mining pools is completely different from a single mining pool exceeding 51%; they are worlds apart.
The hash rate of a mining pool does not represent a complete buyout of miners' hash rates. When a single mining pool's hash rate is too high, miners tend to avoid risks and usually choose to switch their hash rates to mitigate risks.
Therefore, the consensus of Satoshi Nakamoto's POW has reached a delicate balance, integrating factors like hash rate, economics, and interest games, making it nearly impossible to break in the short term. So those FUDing BTC over this matter should calm down.
2) Acknowledging what Teacher Zhang Ren said about Monero's issues does not equate to issues with POW. Even if POW has security risks under extreme conditions, it does not mean that POS is the optimal solution.
In fact, the problems with POW have made the optimal choice of having ASICs as a protective barrier, avoiding the pitfalls of general CPU/GPU mining. To take a step back, even in chains that rely solely on CPU/GPU mining, attempting to attack through a disclosed miner bribery method faces various challenges. For example, exchanges can increase confirmation counts, and miners can add checkpoints, all of which can reduce the probability of being attacked.
You see, when discussing POW issues, the focus should remain on POW itself. Cross-consensus comparisons can lead to misunderstandings. In fact, each consensus has its own security risk boundaries, and of course, the methods of countering them differ; we cannot favor one over the other.
3) I saw that Teacher 0xTodd shared my post and mentioned the concept of "selfish mining." Simply put, when a miner mines a block, they should immediately broadcast it, but selfish miners will secretly hide the mined block, forming a "private chain." When honest miners announce a new block, selfish miners suddenly release their longer hidden chain, rendering the honest miners' work void.
This is actually a very rogue practice and is the main attack method used in this Qubic incident. In reality, its hash rate has not truly reached 51% but can control about 30%, which can theoretically achieve a "double-spending attack." This is because using 30% of miners for selfish mining can create a shadow chain. When honest miners mine a new block, Qubic can suddenly release its longer hidden chain, causing a large number of real miners' blocks to become void, theoretically causing damage equivalent to over 51% hash rate. Furthermore, if the distribution of miner nodes controlled by Qubic is broad enough, it can also leverage network latency and other factors to further reduce the hash rate proportion, achieving a similar effect of controlling the entire network's hash rate.
Thus, Qubic's attack has a significant degree of randomness and concealment, which means that once this method is made public, the threshold for reusing the same trick will become higher.
4) However, I discussed a possibility with security expert n33k, which is that Qubic may not reuse the same trick but instead employ a "boiling frog" style of attack, further bribing miners to increase its mining pool size, and then allowing some miners to intentionally mine empty blocks, creating chaos in the normal operation of the Monero network.
If this continues, it will lead to more and more Monero miners fleeing, as their earnings decrease and the experience becomes terrible. As a result, the hash rate controlled by Qubic will gradually increase until it surpasses 50%, at which point it will be game over for everyone. This chronic attack method is indeed quite frightening.
Although there is no reason to prove that Qubic needs to do this, the possibility of such a "parasitic" chronic attack does exist. In the early stages, Qubic does not need to worry about some miners mining empty blocks in Monero; they will still receive $XMR rewards and can also engage in AI training. In the later stages, if Monero's rewards diminish, they may also attack other chains like Grin and Beam. Throughout this process, Qubic can consistently focus on its AI training mainline, making the logic reasonable.
Because when the demand for AI hash rate grows exponentially, and mining is no longer the only destination for hash rate, the game rules themselves change. The original cost of attacking the network was "purely burning money," but now there is an "additional sponsor" in AI training to foot the bill—attack costs are offset by AI profits.
This is my biggest concern in that article: AI demand is breaking the basic assumption of general CPU/GPU POW mining—"miners rely on mining rewards, so they will maintain the network." When hash rate has more profitable destinations, this assumption no longer holds. Although this process may be slow, there is always the possibility.
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