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Monero appears to be in the midst of a successful 51% attack
- Alifatisk 1y ago"of a 51% attack", it's called a sybil attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack Btw, here's the alternative link https://xcancel.com/p3b7_/status/1955173413992984988 https://xcancel.com/p3b7_/status/1955173413992984988
- vlabakje90 1y agoGoing by the definition given in the wiki you’ve linked, a Sybil attack is about creating many fake identities to gain disproportionate influence in a network. A 51% attack in blockchain terms is specifically about controlling the majority of the network’s mining/staking power to override consensus. So I'd say they're not exactly the same.
- ceejayoz 1y agoSomeone amassing 51% of the network would probably want to do so under some fake identities so others don't realize what's about to happen. Not the same, but probably related.
- delfinom 1y agoLol, there's no such thing as "fake identities" here. You just run more miners with different payout addresses for mining. But there is no "fake"
- ceejayoz 1y ago> You just run more miners with different payout addresses for mining. That it's dramatically easier to conceal your identity doesn't mean concealing your identity isn't useful.
- treyd 1y agoIt's the same failure mode as a Sybil attack, but it's called a 51% when there's the additional assumption of the hashrate being hard to obtain and evenly-enough distributed to mitigate sybiling, and that assumption is being violated.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- the8472 1y agoByzantine Failure seems more appropriate.
- rcxdude 1y agoA Sybil attack is about having many identities in systems which make such identities count for something, blockchains are designed to avoid that attack by saying "identities don't matter for consensus, only raw 'work' does". a 51% attack is therefore analogous to a Sybil attack but not the same thing.
- kevingadd 1y agoReplies seem to be arguing that this wasn't a 51% attack and was something else. I don't know crypto well enough to verify their claims, though.
- dboreham 1y agoPost seems confused. A 51% attack doesn't allow the attacker to sign transactions with someone else's key.
- codeflo 1y agoYou: "Post seems confused. A 51% attack doesn't allow the attacker to sign transactions with someone else's key." Maybe you misread, the post says this: "With its current dominance, Qubic can rewrite the blockchain, enable double-spending, and censor any transaction." All of which are possible if someone has that level of control, and none of which involve signing with other people's keys. (As some people seem confused about the impact of 51% attacks: Of course you can't double-spend in a single blockchain, as that is prevented. But the nature of these attacks is that there's no longer one true blockchain. You can create one fork of the blockchain where you send the money to someone, receive goods in return, and then afterwards switch to a longer fork of the blockchain where the money was never sent.)
- michaelmrose 1y agoDoing this requires massive tangible infrastructure subject to seizure to pay your new bad debts as you become subject to arrest in a lot of the places one may want to spend time in. This doesn't seem like as much of an actual risk. A better way to make money would be to create a perception that the value of the coin is at risk before buying it cheap. Actually devaluing it doesn't seem worthwhile financially.
- codeflo 1y ago> become subject to arrest in a lot of the places I have an idea for a much cheaper way to store and transfer money that also relies on the existence of a police.
- michaelmrose 1y agoTotally agree I just specifically doubt the virtue of stealing with extra steps which involves such obviously tangible assets.
- naikrovek 1y ago[flagged]
- N_Lens 1y agoEnter me - a CBT enthusiast!
- yreg 1y agoCognitive behavioral therapy, or the other one?
- torium 1y ago> Just a month ago lots of you on this site were telling me that 51% attacks on blockchains were almost entirely theoretical. Here's another one (and changing subject): point out that GrapheneOS, which is a privacy focused mobile OS, ONLY supports Pixel, which is a phone produced by Google whose interests are surveillance. People will tell you that your concerns are theoretical. People just don't learn.
- beepbooptheory 1y agoBut wouldn't the people who have the Google phone then be precisely those who could benefit from the privacy focused OS?
- torium 1y agoMy point was that if the people who control X have interest that X be Y, then X will become Y over time, even if it's not Y currently. Sure maybe the people with Google phone X but over time we should expect that Google will find a way to Y, because that's where its interests lie. (And actually, we've seen it do exactly this many times. Chrome being the most obvious example). Here's yet another example. If voters can be bought by promising them money, then we should expect that politicians will start promising money to voters in order to be elected. Etc etc, do you see the pattern? My point wasn't actually about privacy, or Google, or Monero.
- Etheryte 1y agoUnless I'm missing something, this doesn't pass the sniff test. If a 51% attack was successful, every other miner could easily spot this and would stop mining. The fact that this has not happened is more trustworthy than a random guy on Twitter.
- immibis 1y agoWhy would every other miner stop mining, making it a 100% attack? Yesterday I was running a Monero node and looking at it, and got an unusually very high number of chain reorganization messages. I could believe a 51% attack happened.
- corimaith 1y agoA network might collectively just fork the chain and blacklist the attacker in that fork.
- jadamson 1y agoThat isn't possible - miners don't have an "identity" to blacklist.
- im3w1l 1y agoYou could do it with a whitelist. If there is a fork, give disproportionate weight to blocks mined by a whitelisted participant when doing the longest-chain calculation. Ideally you should include the proof of being on the whitelist in the block itself, but if that's not possible for some reason you could always send the information off-chain.
- jadamson 1y agoThat's centralization, which is the opposite of what's intended and has its own risks. Most blocks are mined by pools, so you'll have to whitelist them, and while you might trust the pool operators now, will you forever? You'll be making the cost of an attack significantly cheaper for them (or someone who steals their magic key, or tricks you into adding them to the blessed list).
- fnands 1y agoI am way OOTL with crypto drama. Anyone have any context about who Qubic are, and what their deal is?
- fruitworks 1y agoIt's a long story, I wrote a blog about it here: https://rdrama.net/h/slackernews/post/385556/chud-chudsmug-uses-a-shitcoin-crap https://rdrama.net/h/slackernews/post/385556/chud-chudsmug-u...
- fnands 1y agoThanks!
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- spoaceman7777 1y agoThis is a bot hoax. The only news here is that twitter still hasn't fixed its insane spam account problem
- rmm 1y agoQubix(group performing attack) founder x post https://x.com/c___f___b/status/1955158154213220492 https://x.com/c___f___b/status/1955158154213220492
- Husieandr 1y ago[flagged]
- polotics 1y agoThis man is a true poet, just beautiful look at this quote found on his exTwitter: (quote starts here) """Writing this date here to memorize when the concept of Decentralized Artificial Intelligence (#DAI) got its final shape. Not bullshit like "It runs on a #blockchain so it must be decentralized". In this concept each entity holds a secret know-how which modifies #IntelligentTissue (in cooperation with other know-hows owned by other entities, if needs to solve a complex task). Secrecy of each know-how ensures nobody can copy it, others can only attempt to create something similar by spending computational resources. Each #AI is an original object, #IntelligentTissue is its hologram. #Qubic is the platform for AI creation, their convergence and intelligent tissue hosting"""
- isoprophlex 1y agoPsychosis or marketing scheme? Who can even tell the difference anymore...
- typpilol 1y agoHe's a bit insane. I did the same thing to the iota Network and brought it down to 0% confirmation for a month Trust me he did not like it
- Tiberium 1y agoSeems to not be the case, a real 51% attack would need 10 blocks at the very least, because that's when Monero transactions get confirmed. See e.g. https://x.com/kayabaNerve/status/1955173552363016434 https://x.com/kayabaNerve/status/1955173552363016434 https://x.com/kayabaNerve/status/1955228805598966258 https://x.com/kayabaNerve/status/1955228805598966258
- moomin 1y agoTo summarise: * One actor in the space appears to have done a proof of concept takeover of 51%. * It’s not clear there was any malicious action nor intent in doing so. * Performing something like this is definitely expensive. * The potential impact of doing so is disputed. * Whether or not it was achieved is also disputed However, what has been known you some time is that the largest BitCoin miners have more power than the entire community of many alt-coins. Whether this is an issue is a matter for debate. Certainly, until now, no-one has chosen to flex like this.
- lagniappe 1y ago>until now, no-one has chosen to flex like this. The two networks have wildly different proof-of-work algorithms, they're incompatible. A BTC ASIC will never mine Monero, ever.
- rokkamokka 1y agoThat's not true for all altcoins however
- yieldcrv 1y agoIts always hilarious when someone launches an L1 with an algorithm everyone can already dominate and it gets attacked immediately Last time I saw that was on photonics processor blockchains
- scyclow 1y agoPretty much everything other than bitcoin, monero, and dogecoin are running proof of stake these days anyhow, so it kind of doesn't matter.
- OutOfHere 1y agoLitecoin goes in that PoW group too. In fact, Litecoin has an optional privacy feature called MWEB, which is probably why Litecoin too got kicked off of being named on some conventional news sites.
- lblume 1y agohttps://xcancel.com/p3b7_/status/1955173413992984988 https://xcancel.com/p3b7_/status/1955173413992984988
- vlugorilla 1y agohttps://nitter.net/tuxpizza/status/1955191610410401816#m https://nitter.net/tuxpizza/status/1955191610410401816#m
- typpilol 1y agoLooks like they are winning. Looking at that website I see that the unknown pool keeps getting a longer chain and it switches to it
- subsistence234 1y agoWhat percentage of unknown miners is Qubic?
- art_vandalay 1y ago100% a fed action. Government influence has been pushing Monero off of exchanges and now this. Why? Because Monero has true anonymity.
- rootsudo 1y agoInteresting, I don’t disagree but would like to learn more.
- ysofunny 1y agofiat money has to be a monoply specially given its only backing is "trust" (trust that you won't get invaded or overthrown) anonymous alt coins, real digital cash, are competition to the monetary system. there can be only one.
- nickysielicki 1y agoIf you exchange Bitcoin for cash, the IRS can retroactively look at every wallet that this money originated through. If they decide that they don’t like how certain coins were earned, they can mark them and any wallet they touched as poisoned, and put you in jail if you try to exchange them further. Monero transactions are inherently obfuscated, which solves this problem. If you want more details, the Monero whitepaper is well written to be accessible for the common reader. The tldr is it works atop ring signatures: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_signature https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_signature
- vintermann 1y ago> Monero transactions are inherently obfuscated, which solves this problem. It solves the problem by making all participants culpable. The blockchain community is very good at imagining they have technical solutions to social problems.
- nickysielicki 1y agoI don’t believe US courts would see it the same way, if you use Monero for legitimate transactions you will not go to jail.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- msuniverse2026 1y agoWhat is qubic offering to miners that other pools can't?
- nunobrito 1y agoGamification. They are supposedly offered some other shitcoin in return for the monero that they mine. I've tried it myself some months ago, it is noticeable that they were lying about the number of miners on that platform.
- soared 1y agoMuch better link - https://www.cointribune.com/en/qubic-hits-52-72-of-moneros-total-hashrate/ https://www.cointribune.com/en/qubic-hits-52-72-of-moneros-t... Appears to be legit, but not really a nefarious attack.
- Stevvo 1y agoThat entire article reads like propaganda/doublespeak. "Planned test". Planned by whom? Planned by the attackers. The reorg did happen.
- sigmar 1y ago>Did Qubic really attack Monero ? No, according to official statements, it was a planned stress test to identify vulnerabilities in the Monero network. "not really a nefarious attack" is an insane summation of this article. There's zero way for someone outside of qubic to verify that they didn't do something nefarious while controlling the network. Stated another way- anyone could call their 51% attack a "stress test"
- rahen 1y agoThis is odd. The current hash rate is around its nominal 5 GH/s, and neither any pool nor individual seems to be above 50%: https://miningpoolstats.stream/monero https://miningpoolstats.stream/monero This Qubic group claims to concentrate 3 GH/s of hashing power, yet there has been no increase in the global hash rate either: https://www.coinwarz.com/mining/monero/hashrate-chart https://www.coinwarz.com/mining/monero/hashrate-chart Could this be just a bait?
- fruitworks 1y agoPeek the % of unknown miners in the pie chart at the bottom Also https://moneroconsensus.info/ https://moneroconsensus.info/
- znpy 1y agodumb question: i took a look at https://miningpoolstats.stream/ethereumclassic https://miningpoolstats.stream/ethereumclassic for ethereumclassic and f2pool.com seems to have ~64% of the total hashrate... is that a takeover as well ?
- idiotsecant 1y agoI mean, it means that eth classic's ledger is rewritable on a whim by that that pool, if it has central control.
- nullc 1y agoYou don't mean to suggest that a scammy cryptocurrency entity that is currently bragging about attacking a competing system might ... lie to people???? Is that possible?
- max_ 1y ago>Sustaining this attack is estimated to cost $75 million per day. This is how proof of work systems operate. They are very expensive to attack but very cheap to recover from. $75m per day is clearly unstainable. Soon they will give up and the network will recover cheaply. The attack is more of a nuisance than the end of Monero.
- arrowsmith 1y ago> $75m per day is clearly sustainable. Is this a typo or am I misunderstanding something?
- transcriptase 1y agoI’m guessing it’s implied that the return would be higher than $75m a day.
- max_ 1y agoThanks. "unsustainable"
- m_herrlich 1y agonow it says unstainable Also true!
- sschueller 1y agoDepends what the goal is. A state that wants to break the anonymity of the system doesn't care about $75m per day, specifically a state that can just print that...
- woah 1y agoI'm not familiar with Monero's privacy system, so I can't say for sure, but it is very, very unlikely that a reorg could in any way break anonymity.
- fruitworks 1y ago
- cookiengineer 1y agoMaybe Black Owl is finishing off APT29's remaining part of the former Mirai botnet? I'm just saying that this might be a state sponsored actor fighting another one, given that Mirai was primarily hosting XMR miners, and given that they lost 3.5 Mio bots overnight in 2023.
- vlugorilla 1y agoA 6 re-org does not mean a '51% attack' was successful. In that case, we'd see unbounded-depth re-orgs/no blocks mined by any other mining pool (assuming the adversary censors other mining pools, as this one does). It does mean an adversary with a high amount of hash got lucky. I noted there's a discrepancy between their claimed network hashrate and pools' claimed network hash rate. They may not be including their own hash rate in the network's, in which case they'd need to exceed it. Having 51% would only be 34% of total. They're an unreliable narrator and I wouldn't trust any data from them. There's insufficient evidence to claim they have 51% of the network's hash power. (https://nitter.net/kayabaNerve/with_replies https://nitter.net/kayabaNerve/with_replies)
- vlugorilla 1y agoQubic never actually hit 51% btw. Don't fall for it. However they do have a large enough hashrate to perform multi-block re-orgs with their selfish mining strategy. They disabled API hashrate reporting so that they could lie about it. Keep mining and ignore the noise. (https://nitter.net/tuxpizza/status/1955191610410401816#m https://nitter.net/tuxpizza/status/1955191610410401816#m)
- reorder9695 1y agoI am not that well versed in crypto. I understand the concept of a blockchain and what an n block reorg is, but what is the downside of a reorg? Like who can profit financially and why?
- johnpaulkiser 1y agoYou get all the money from the block rewards for those blocks if you reorg other miners blocks out.
- NooneAtAll3 1y agowho are "they" you're talking about?
- 1y ago
- chuckadams 1y agoThe thing about 51% attacks is they're hard to pull off in secret. And once they happen, who's going to accept the coin anymore? Plenty of potential for sheer destruction, but it seems pretty counter-productive to value.
- taylorius 1y agoMaybe destruction is their goal.
- seanw444 1y agoA lot of people would like to see Monero burn.
- chaboud 1y agoIf only someone offered derivatives contracts that could be used to make money from destruction... https://www.kraken.com/en-ca/features/derivatives/monero https://www.kraken.com/en-ca/features/derivatives/monero
- loxs 1y agoYeah, but the moment that happens they will confiscate/block the funds of the shorters.
- SilasX 1y agoReminder: if you want to bet on an asset's demise (i.e. short it), you don't need a derivatives market, you just need to be able to borrow the asset and sell it. So you could accomplish the goal there by borrowing Monero and converting it to USD. A lot of smartcontract platforms let you do this -- including on other chains, where they hold a token convertible into the original chain's native unit. I bring this up because people are always asking what platforms are allowing me to short cryptocurrencies, which seems to miss that it's enough to just have a debt denominated in what you want to bet against.
- blueprint 1y agoA couple researchers have told me that it's not necessary to even reach 51%. It's probably something closer to 35% to maintain the ability to perform censorship etc
- treyd 1y agoNot quite. You can make selfish mining economically viable below 51%, which eats into the profitability of the majority, but it's not possible to sustain a long term censorship attack with that. With PoS protocols, >33% is usually when you have the ability to inhibit finality, which may be what you're thinking of.
- blueprint 1y agothey ran numbers on it. Do you have any references to support what you're saying?
- mistercheph 1y agoYou are not only appealing to the imaginary authority of someone that you talked to while demanding that someone else cite sources, but you also seem neither to understand the subject you're talking about nor able to accurately recall the hearsay you're offering as evidence. When you are lost in the woods, seek out a map!
- blueprint 1y agoi'm not appealing to anything except for asking the dude who replied to me for a damn reference when I'm the one who was friends with researchers who told me about their own work. Learn how conversations work instead of trying to shit on other people. Jerk.
- api 1y agoOne of the major things that has always bothered me about crypto: if an economically "irrational" large player wanted to 51% something like Bitcoin, they could. I am thinking of, for example, a nation-state. Let's say the US, EU, or China decided for some reason that it was in their national interest to blow up Bitcoin. This could happen if an adversary like Russia or its allies were using Bitcoin for funding and there was a war or a major Cold War style struggle. Such players could afford to purchase and build, in secret, a huge mining farm, and then suddenly turn it on, not caring about the cost because the goals are strategic. It would be massively expensive but it doesn't matter for this case.
- giancarlostoro 1y agoThe moment anyone does this, people will notice, and the coin plummets.
- jacooper 1y agoWhich is what they want.
- giancarlostoro 1y agoat 75 million a day what is the motive?
- spiderice 1y ago> a nation-state. Let's say the US, EU, or China decided for some reason that it was in their national interest to blow up Bitcoin Irrelevant and impossible to "know", given that it hasn't happened yet (if it ever does)
- Paradigma11 1y agoThey could borrow 1 Billion in Monero and sell it. Then they would only have to pay back a fraction and keep the rest.
- 1y ago
- 0xbadcafebee 1y agoThe ridiculousness of cryptocurrency reminds me of the ridiculousness of the stock market. Both are absolutely batshit insane ways to maintain a global monetary system, yet people keep investing their fortunes in both.
- woadwarrior01 1y agoSidenote: IDK how is Ledger, a French company, still in business after compromising ~300k users' physical addresses[1] amongst other PII, ~5 years ago. [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/ledgerwalletleak/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ledgerwalletleak/
- deadbabe 1y agoWhat really happens to a crypto coin if trust in the ledger is shattered? Does the coin stay alive purely because people still speculate on hype or does everyone try to cash out simultaneously and send price into a death spiral?
- subsistence234 1y agoShattered is the trust in transactions that happened during the time period where the attacker controlled >51%, from addresses that the attacker also controlled. AFAIK so far they haven't controlled 51% for any amount of time, though they did control more than 33% for a short while, which is enough for "selfish mining." Either way, the attack did illustrate that a government could easily take over XMR if they wanted to. The impact of that, we'll have to wait and see.
- redwood 1y agoReminds me of the old IRC Channel takeover