Attacking the $5 billion giant Monero with $75 million, what exactly does Qubic want to do?

Is the blockchain project Qubic's announcement of a 51% hashrate attack on the Monero network a demonstration of technical prowess or just a bluff marketing gimmick? This article delves into the motivations behind it, the community's questioning and counterattack. (Synopsis: Monero suspected to be 51% attacked!) Ledger CTO: Qubic has most of the computing power, can rewrite the XMR blockchain, implement double spending: (Background added: Monero decentralization crisis? Qubic wants to grab Monero's "51% computing power", analyst: ring alarm bells for all PoW) If the drama of the coin circle never lacks stories, this time, the protagonist is replaced by Monero (Monero). This was not a sudden attack, but a well-prepared hashrate showdown that had been announced a month in advance — the attackers had even announced in advance that they would "challenge the Monero network between August 2 and August 31." Their goal is to point to an achievement rarely seen in the blockchain world: control 51% of the hash rate of a network of privacy coins with a market capitalization of more than $5 billion. And today, the attackers claim to have achieved that goal. This is a long-planned attack We all know that in a blockchain network, all transactions must be verified by miners, a process known as "mining". A miner's computing power is called hashrate, and the higher the hashrate, the greater the chance of mining a new block and getting a reward. The same goes for Monero. But compared to other coins, Monero has a design to prevent large mining pools from doing evil - it does not support dedicated mining machine (ASIC), and can only be mined with the CPU or GPU of ordinary computers, and the original intention of this rule is to prevent miners from gathering in the same large mining pool, so that in theory, anyone can use their own computer to participate in mining, and the network will be fairer and more decentralized. But this mechanism also has an idealized way of being attacked, that is, renting or mobilizing a large number of ordinary servers in a short period of time ( such as cloud computing resources, idle PCs, miner computers, ). And that's exactly how this attacker did it. Let's look at this long-planned attacker, called Qubic. The initiative was initiated by Qubic, an independent blockchain project that was not born to attack Monero. It is led by IOTA co-founder and senior crypto developer Sergey Ivancheglo ( nicknamed Come-From-Beyond), using a "useful proof-of-work" (UPoW) mechanism. Let the miner's computing power not only be used to solve mathematical problems, but also train its artificial intelligence system "Aigarth", killing two birds with one stone. So why is it associated with Monero and waging a hashrate "war" against it? In fact, this is an "economic demonstration" (economic demonstration) Qubic's ability to demonstrate its UPoW model. Starting in May 2025, it has successfully attracted a large number of miners to join by using its own network computing power for Monero's CPU mining, earning both Monero and $QUBIC tokens by mining alone. Monero mined by miners is sold into stablecoins, which are then bought back and destroyed to form a self-reinforcing economic cycle. After Qubic announced that it would "challenge" the Monero network between August 2 and August 31, some Monero community members began monitoring the on-chain around the clock. Someone said on Reddit that they keep an eye on every block, especially the appearance of "lone blocks," (orphan blocks that are discarded ). At first everything worked fine, but in the early hours of one morning he noticed that a chain reorganization had occurred (chain reorg). It stands to reason that chain reorganizations are not uncommon on the Monero network, such as when two miners mine blocks at the same time, the system will choose one and discard the other. However, the timing of this time is suspicious and seems to be related to Qubic's ability to test the ability to insert alternative blocks and fork the blockchain. Although the alternative block was ultimately rejected, it also indicates that Qubic is trying to act. Monero's Block Status Monitors also found that Monero was supposed to produce a block every two minutes, but the rate of block generation has increased significantly recently, and the network seems to have detected signs of stress for a potential attack. This convinced him that Qubic was indeed doing some kind of interference. Another participant noted that the only orphan block that appeared happened 12 hours before Qubic publicly claimed to launch the attack. In terms of hashrate data, the community also observed that Qubic stopped reporting hash power to public mining pool statistics sites in early August, which made it impossible for the outside world to directly see their real mining power. Some speculate that this may be to hide peak computing power, create a sense of opacity, and display more favorable numbers through websites they control. Monero core team members analyzed that their computing power is not constant, but regularly switches between peaks and valleys, and this "switch" mode is more threatening than stable mining. The result of Qubic's premeditated attack to "flex muscles" was that Qubic accounted for nearly 40% of the Monero network's hashrate between May and July. By August, Qubic claimed to have reached 52.72%, directly crossing the 51% "threshold of control" — meaning it was technically capable of reorganizing chains, conducting double-spend attacks, or censoring transactions. Qubic claims that this is to simulate possible attacks on the Monero network and detect security weaknesses as early as possible. In fact, Qubic is bluffing? So did Qubic really succeed in a 51% attack? There are still many people who are skeptical that this is just a deliberate marketing campaign to deceive. @VictorMoneroXMR questioned with the screenshot below. While the total computing power of other Monero mining pools is displayed as 4.41 GH/s and the network-wide computing power is displayed as 5.35 GH/s, Qubic's data dashboard shows that it has 2.45 GH/s computing power under the same network-wide computing power, which is obviously not the number, and it is possible that Qubic's data Kanban does not incorporate its own computing power into the network-wide computing power. If we correct this assumption, Qubit's hashrate is actually only about 30% of the total computing power. In addition to the data skepticism, the most direct on-chain evidence is that Monero has suffered a block reorganization of 6 consecutive blocks, but this does not provide 100% certainty that Qubit has the ability to launch a 51% attack. This is also evidenced by the Monero Reddit community's real-time monitoring of blocks. Throughout the Qubic challenge, the community saw no sustained and significant orphan block additions or chain reorganizations, with only one suspected reorg and alternative blocks rejected. Core developers and the community have observed that Qubic has approached or even slightly exceeded 50% of the hashrate at some times (Qubic claiming to have reached 52.72% ), even if it exceeds 51% in a short period of time, if it is only a few minutes or a few blocks, it may not be able to complete a valid attack. That said, there's no evidence that they're stable above 51% long enough to launch a successful attack. The current consensus in the Monero community is that Qubic can...