Monero Under Pressure: Qubic’s Dual‑Mining Model Tests Community’s Nerves

Monero’s privacy‑centric blockchain is bracing for what could be the first true economic 51% attack as rival project Qubic lines up enough hashpower to test network control from Aug.  2 to Aug.  31, next week.

From Idle CPUs to Potential 51% Chaos

Founded in 2014, the Monero network hides senders, recipients, and amounts through cryptography while keeping validation open via a CPU‑friendly proof‑of‑work algorithm called RandomX. Qubic, created by Sergey “CFB”  Ivancheglo, exploits that same hardware. It’s Useful Proof of Work (uPoW) splits each computer’s effort: about half tackles artificial‑intelligence (AI) tasks that secure Qubic, and the rest mines Monero during idle cycles.

The earned XMR is sold for tether (USDT), exchanged for QUBIC tokens, and burned, boosting Qubic’s token value. So far, the strategy has proved magnetic. Qubic’s share of Monero’s global hashrate floated between 20 % and 30% in July. On July 28, Qubic’s hashrate share reached an all-time high of 36.91% of the network’s 6.15 gigahash per second (GH/s) of computational power.

Ivancheglo has teased an August demonstration meant to push past the critical 51 percent mark. If successful, a single entity could reorganize blocks, censor transactions, or double‑spend funds—classic symptoms of a majority attack. For readers new to mining politics, hashrate is voting power: each solved block adds a new page to the ledger, and the majority decides which pages count. With more than half the votes, an operator can quietly rewrite recent history, invalidating honest work by others.

The economic lure is powerful. Dual‑earning through uPoW can net miners roughly more than $3 a day per CPU, versus about 64  cents for solo Monero mining, internal estimates show. Analysts call it an “economic attack”: instead of renting short‑term hashpower, Qubic simply offers better pay and watches miners follow the money.

Monero’s grassroots community has moved quickly. On Reddit and X, node operators begged miners to migrate to decentralized pools such as P2pool, while exchanges were urged to raise confirmation depth from 10 to 13 blocks to blunt possible reorganizations. Some contributors floated a RandomX tweak, consensus changes, or even a hard fork if Qubic’s dominance persisted, though maintainers have not scheduled code changes.

Qubic backers counter that the experiment simply validates uPoW and could even harden Monero by forcing upgrades. Influencer reaction is split. Former Monero lead maintainer Riccardo “fluffypony”  Spagni dismissed the attack and called one person’s X thread “absurd chatGPT‑generated nonsense,” arguing miners cannot pierce Monero’s privacy layer.

Under the hood, uPoW relies on two roles. “Computors” compete weekly by solving AI challenges that rank validators, while a swarm of “AI miners” supplies the raw computation. A dispatcher flips CPU cores between training neural networks and mining RandomX, masking the switch through encrypted shares and frequent address changes. Once XMR rewards are converted and QUBIC tokens burned, fewer tokens remain in circulation, raising scarcity and further enticing miners.

Either way, the showdown offers a real‑time lesson in the delicate dance between open incentives and collective security—a plot twist even seasoned crypto watchers admit they did not see coming. The next chapter will be written by miners’ profit calculators as much as by developers’ keyboards.