Hashrate Heist or Hype?
Sometimes where there’s FUD, there’s fire and sometimes, it is just hype.
A $300 million AI project just claimed it conquered a $6 billion privacy fortress.
Qubic's audacious experiment unfolded over months: seduce Monero miners with triple the profits, accumulate network dominance, then demonstrate a textbook 51% attack complete with block reorganizations and exchange warnings.
August 12th brought their victory lap - a technical blog post celebrating "history in the making" as they allegedly seized control of Monero's consensus mechanism.
Six blocks reorganized. Sixty orphaned in 24 hours. Mission accomplished.
But the receipts paint a different picture.
Pool stats showed Qubic running closer to 30% hashrate, not the claimed majority.
Their public dashboards mysteriously went offline just as things got interesting.
Maybe this was legitimate network stress-testing. Maybe it was performance art designed to pump QUBIC tokens.
When the attack makes headlines and the attackers make bank, who's pulling the strings?
Qubic didn't stumble into Monero mining by accident.
Their pitch sounded revolutionary: "Useful Proof of Work" that could train AI models while securing a blockchain.
Instead of burning electricity on meaningless hashes like Bitcoin, Qubic's miners would contribute to something bigger - feeding computational power into AIGarth, their on-chain AI system.
The Monero experiment was supposedly just a proof of concept.
A way to demonstrate that their mining infrastructure could pivot between tasks - AI training one minute, cryptocurrency mining the next.
But revolutionary tech needs revolutionary incentives.
Qubic dangled an offer Monero miners couldn't refuse: 3x profitability over Monero for miners.
Mine through their pools, and your CPU would earn triple what it made elsewhere.
The math was simple. Qubic would mine Monero, sell the XMR, use half the proceeds to buy and burn QUBIC tokens, and distribute the other half as bonus rewards to miners.
Mining Monero became a QUBIC token destruction machine.
Over months, hashrate quietly migrated.
Epoch by epoch, Qubic's share of Monero's network grew from under 2% to over 27%.
Qubic claims the peak hashrate hit 2.77 GH/s - nearly half of Monero's total computational power.
Then came the community vote.
Qubic's validators faced a simple question: should they orphan blocks from other Monero miners once they controlled 51% of the network?
The vote passed. Was this democracy in action?
Or was it just theater to justify what they'd planned all along?
When your validators vote to attack another chain, did they choose war or just choose profits?
The Claimed Victory
August 11th started with a warning shot.
Come-from-Beyond, Qubic's founder, tweeted a genteel heads-up to Monero holders: expect some turbulence.
The man behind the handle had form. AKA Sergey Ivancheglo co-founded IOTA before departing amid public feuds and created NXT, one of the first proof-of-stake blockchains.
His IOTA co-founder once diplomatically noted CFB's "unorthodox actions as it pertains to communication" - crypto-speak for "brilliant but combustible."
True to form, his Monero warning came wrapped in technical politeness.
Between specific UTC timestamps, Qubic and Monero teams would conduct a "controlled test" that might increase orphaned blocks.
Nothing to worry about, he assured. Just don't fall for the FUD.
Twenty-four hours later, mission accomplished.
Qubic's blog post read like a conquest manifesto: "History was made as the Qubic protocol successfully completed its attempt to dominate the Monero network."
They'd reached 51% hashrate dominance and successfully reorganized the blockchain.
The evidence seemed compelling.
Six blocks got reorganized. Sixty blocks orphaned in a single day.
dkat from Qubic bragged about mining 63 blocks in a window of 122 - surpassing their 51% target.
Their weapon of choice? Selfish mining.
Mine blocks in secret, sit on them, then dump a longer chain that makes everyone else's work disappear. Crypto's version of the sucker punch.
Classic game theory in action. Why play fair when you can stack the deck?
CFB played the role of gracious conqueror, warning to expect orphan blocks and claiming technical dominance.
Community observers described the implications: "They intend to orphan all blocks from every other miner, making themselves the only mining entity of Monero." The smaller protocol had just flexed on the bigger one.
The smaller protocol had just flexed on the bigger one.
But here's where the victory narrative gets interesting: they decided not to completely take over Monero's consensus "because of internal discussions on whether that would hurt Monero's price."
How considerate.
When your network attack comes with moral reservations about market impact, are you stress-testing security or stress-testing your PR strategy?
The Skeptics Strike Back
Not everyone bought the victory lap.
SeraiDEX's lead developer Luke Parker threw cold water on the celebration: "A 6 re-org does not mean a '51% attack' was successful."
Real 51% attacks show unbounded-depth reorganizations and total censorship of other pools.
This? Parker called it luck with a high hashrate.
Reddit detectives started pulling receipts.
One user cross-referenced Qubic's self-reported numbers against independent pool trackers. The math didn't add up.
Qubic claimed a peak of 3.01 GH/s hashrate while independent tracking showed Monero's total network at 5 GH/s - but Qubic's current rate was only 2.08 GH/s, putting them closer to 40% than the magical 51% threshold.
But here's the smoking gun: Qubic disabled their public API stats right before the "takeover." Convenient timing for a protocol claiming transparency.
Monero's community pushed back hard. Organized boycotts and hashrate redirection campaigns cut Qubic's share from around 45% to under 15% within hours.
One Reddit user summed up the skepticism perfectly: "They infiltrated the monero discord about a month ago and started spamming us with their nonsense. We theorize it could be some kind of psy op... there's simply too many fake supporters."
Twitter user tuxsudo pointed out the obvious: "They disabled API hashrate reporting so that they could lie about it."
Analysts started calling it what it was: marketing theater with mining on the side.
The receipts kept stacking. Lucky block streaks, not network domination. Hashrate numbers that didn't add up. Coincidentally timed with QUBIC burn announcements.
When your historic network takeover gets debunked by community sleuths in real-time, maybe the real attack was on common sense?
Token Burn Theater
Here's where things get spicy.
Qubic's entire Monero operation wasn't just about proving technical superiority - it was a token burning machine disguised as network security research.
The economics were beautiful in their simplicity. Mine Monero, dump the XMR for cash, use that cash to buy QUBIC tokens, then burn them to reduce supply and pump the price.
During their peak performance, Qubic burned 33.5 billion QUBIC tokens at an average rate of $2,280 per billion. In the previous epoch, they burned 65.9 billion QUBIC - all funded by their Monero mining "experiment."
The timing was convenient. They mined exactly 63 blocks in a window of 122 - precisely 51.6% that barely crossed the threshold needed to claim a "51% attack."
Qubic's weekly reports read like token burn victory laps. Each epoch recap led with destruction statistics before mentioning the actual mining.
The community had voted to "orphan other miners" - but maybe the real vote was on whether to prioritize network security or token economics.
When your attack generates better returns than most DeFi protocols, are you hacking networks or hacking investor psychology?
Numbers Don’t Lie (or do they?)
The math should be simple, but the receipts tell conflicting stories.
Qubic claimed 2.77 GH/s peak hashrate and boasted that dkat mined 63 blocks in a window of 122 - precisely 51.6%.
But independent tracking showed problems. Monero's total network ran at 4.99 GH/s during the attack, while MiningPoolStats showed Qubic with "no hashrate" after they stopped reporting on July 30.
The timing was convenient. Qubic removed their stats from public sites right before their "takeover."
SlowMist's founder warned the attack "seems to have succeeded", while secondary reports claimed Qubic's hashrate reached 52.36% - but these numbers came from Qubic's own systems that had just gone dark publicly.
ycombinator - Hacker News analysis showed the "Unknown" pool category jumped from ~3% to ~23%, suggesting actual control around 20%.
Markets stayed calm. XMR dropped 10% - respectable fear, but nothing like real 51% attacks. Bitcoin Gold lost over 50% during its majority attacks.
Within hours, community boycotts reduced Qubic's hashrate below 14%. Six blocks reorganized, 60 orphaned—surgical enough for headlines, limited enough to avoid permanent damage.
Real 51% attacks create unbounded chaos. This created measured disruption.
When your "historic takeover" gets reversed by Reddit boycotts and the numbers only work if you trust the attacker's data, who's controlling the narrative?
The Bigger Picture
Cut through the noise and one thing becomes clear: money talks louder than manifestos.
Qubic didn't hack Monero with some genius exploit. They just offered miners better pay.
Triple the mining rewards proved more powerful than years of ideological commitment to decentralization.
Miners jumped ship faster than passengers on the Titanic.
This wasn't just about Monero's security model. It exposed the fragile economics underlying all proof-of-work networks.
Most PoW chains face similar vulnerabilities.
Any PoW chain with modest mining rewards sits vulnerable to well-funded actors offering better deals.
The really scary part? Qubic proved you don't need majority control to cause majority damage.
Selfish mining requiring only 33-40% hashrate plus some clever timing created the same market panic and network disruption as a "real" 51% attack.
Perception became reality faster than blockchain confirmations.
Traditional finance calls this market manipulation. Crypto calls it "stress testing."
The line between legitimate security research and profitable FUD campaigns keeps getting thinner.
When your experiment generates billions in token burns while tanking a competitor's price, maybe the research was just an excuse.
Qubic's timing was ironically convenient. Announce the experiment, accumulate hashrate, claim victory, pump token metrics, then graciously decide not to take over the protocol's consensus "because of internal discussions on whether that would hurt Monero's price."
Pure CFB. The serial crypto innovator behind NXT and IOTA had turned economic warfare into an art form - brilliant technical execution delivered with maximum controversy.
When accused of being "sponsored by 3-letter agencies to attack this anon coin," he deployed peak CFB deflection: actually, he was helping Monero prepare for future government attacks.
Turn suspicion into salvation, controversy into charity.
But here's the kicker: maybe it doesn't matter.
Sometimes crypto runs on hype, not facts.
Qubic spun a tale about AI-powered domination and watched it become temporary reality through pure hype.
When headlines move prices faster than hashrates, who's getting played - the protocol or the people buying it?
Sometimes the most successful heists are the ones nobody can prove happened.
Qubic walked away with billions in token burns, a successful marketing campaign, and a "network takeover" that reads better in headlines than blockchain data.
Whether they actually controlled 51% of Monero's hashrate matters less than convincing everyone they could.
The market moved, the story spread, and QUBIC's deflationary mechanics churned while XMR holders watched their bags bleed.
Monero kept working fine, but the damage was done.
Nobody cares about technical rebuttals when the headlines already wrote themselves.
The genius move wasn't the mining tricks - it was selling the story.
Profitable mining became a "historic attack." Token burns became security research.
When narratives move markets faster than fundamentals, what's the difference between disruption and distraction?
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