Additional viewpoints on Qubic's attack on Monero coin.

Thank you for the pro's insights; I learned a lot. I sincerely find that this matter can be big or small. Insiders see the subtleties, while outsiders see the spectacle. Let me add a few more points:

1. Seeing overseas pros use this to FUD Bitcoin, the reason being the current mining pool hashrate distribution, the top two mining pools Foundry USA (33.6%) and AntPool (17.9%) already exceed 51% combined, thus drawing a crude conclusion, if the two major mining pools collude, Bitcoin is done for. This is a typical case of an outsider blindly watching the excitement because they overlook two points:

1. The situation of two mining pools accounting for 51% and one mining pool exceeding 51% is completely different, like heaven and earth;

2. The hash rate of a mining pool does not represent the complete acquisition of miners' hash rates. When a single mining pool's hash rate is too high, miners will usually take the initiative to switch hash rates to avoid risks.

So the consensus of Satoshi Nakamoto's POW has evolved to now, integrating factors such as computing power, economics, and interest games, achieving a delicate balance, with almost no possibility of being broken in the short term. Therefore, those who FUD BTC should take a break.

2. Acknowledge what Teacher Zhang Ren said: the issues with Monero do not equate to the issues with POW, even if POW has security risks under extreme conditions, it does not mean that POS is completely the optimal solution.

In fact, the problem with POW is that ASIC has made an optimal choice as a moat, avoiding the pitfalls of general CPU/GPU mining. To take a step back, even for chains that mine purely with CPU/GPU, attempting to attack them through a disclosed miner bribery method also faces various challenges. For example, exchanges can increase the number of confirmations, and miners can add checkpoints, among other methods, to reduce the probability of being attacked.

You see, when discussing the issue of POW, the focus is on POW itself. When comparing cross-consensus, there will be misunderstandings. In fact, there are security risk boundaries that each consensus jumps out of, and of course, the ways to counterbalance are different; we cannot favor one over the other.

3. I saw that Teacher 0xTodd retweeted my post and talked about the concept of "selfish mining". Simply put, it means that miners should immediately broadcast the blocks they mine, but selfish miners will secretly hide the mined blocks, forming a "private chain". When honest miners announce new blocks, selfish miners suddenly release their hidden longer chain, rendering the work of honest miners completely useless.

This is actually a very rogue approach and is the main attack method of Qubic this time. In reality, its computing power has not really reached 51%, but it may control about 30%, which can temporarily realize the theoretical "double spending attack"? Because, using 30% of the miners for selfish mining, it forms a shadow chain. When honest miners mine new blocks, Qubic suddenly releases its own longer chain, making a large number of real miners' blocks invalid, theoretically causing a destructive effect of over 51% of the computing power. Furthermore, if the distribution of miners in the mining pool controlled by Qubic is wide enough, it can also use network latency and other factors to further reduce the ratio of computing power, achieving the same effect of controlling the entire network's computing power.

Therefore, the attack on Qubic this time has a very high degree of randomness and concealment, which means that once this method is made public, the threshold for reapplying the same trick will be higher.

4. But I had a conversation with n33k, a pro, about a possibility that Qubic might not repeat its old tricks, but instead use a "boiling frog" method of attack to operate, further bribing miners to increase its mining pool size, and then having some miners intentionally empty blocks to create chaos in the normal operation of the Monero network.

If this continues, it will lead to more and more Monero miners fleeing, after all, the profits are decreasing and the experience is really terrible. As a result, the computing power controlled by Qubic will gradually increase, reaching over 50%, and at that point, it's game over for everyone. This kind of chronic attack method is actually quite scary.

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 emptying blocks on Monero; they will still receive XMR rewards and can also perform AI training. In the later stages, if Monero's rewards decrease, they may still attack other chains like Grin and Beam. Throughout this process, Qubic can always stick to its main line of AI training, making the logic reasonable.

Because when the demand for AI computing power grows exponentially, and mining is no longer the only place for computing power, the rules of the game have changed. The cost of attacking the network used to be "purely burning money," but now there is this "additional sponsor" of AI training to foot the bill—attack costs are hedged by AI gains.

This is my biggest concern about that article: AI demand is breaking the fundamental assumption of general CPU/GPU POW mining - "miners rely on mining profits, so they will maintain the network." When computing power finds more profitable avenues, this assumption no longer holds. Although this process will be slow, there is always the possibility.