Qubic's planned 51% attack against Monero

Qubic has announced it will launch its 51% attack against Monero in two days. For the last weeks, its hashrate has been slowly going up, from 5% to over 30% now. Qubic mines on and off, but they mined for 24 hours straight last Sunday and its hashrate was close to 30%. Right now, when Qubic is mining, they are close to 34% hashrate : https://explorer.jetskipool.ai/xmr-tracker.html

The risk is serious.

I really like this explanation of what is wrong right now with Monero and how it makes such attack possible : https://x.com/the_smart_ape/status/1950833481883500554

I am a big fan of Monero and have been for years, but I did not see much discussion on r/Monero about this problem and the devs have been sleeping. Monero's value is based on trust and if Qubic is able to make its 51% attack, trust would vanish.

We could discuss how they are able to do it (is Qubic a front for a three letter agency with deep pockets to rent CPU power and attack the best privacy coin?) but the truth is they are doing it right now. If it's not a three letter agency front, then it's surely some kind of ponzi scheme where Qubic's own price fuels the rewards to the miners (you can't logically explain otherwise how they supposedly reward miners 3X more than what they would if mining Monero alone), but in the end a 51% attack is a 51% attack is a 51% attack. And we know what happen after a 51% attack : double-spending, collapse of trust, and, well, just look at Vertcoin or others.

Qubic is a new enemy, that was not understood before. By centralizing miners, it disconnects the miners from the holders. Before, miners had a strong incentive NOT to join a pool that would reach 51%. In 2022, when MineXMR pool got close to that limit, all that was needed was to ask miners to voluntarily choose another pool, so they won't hurt Monero. They did it and problem was over.

But now, the beast is different. Miners using Qubic do not care about Monero. Qubic is a parasite and even if it kills its host, it will simply switch to another host (the guy behind Qubic already said Doge might be his next target). This is completely new.

This is why I said, and others more intelligent and tech-savvy than I said as well, that Monero devs should react ASAP with, if needed, a hard fork. No solution is perfect, but maybe banning pool like Wownero did is an idea. Limiting pool power is another idea. Or maybe making transactions more expensive (who would care if transactions were $0.10 instead of $0.01 if it secures the network). Or something else.

The point is : there needs to have a discussion and so far the Monero devs have been asleep.

And to those who think this is irrelevant because they are not invested in Monero, think again : if it happens to Monero, it can happen to many other coins later on.

Urgent action is needed by the devs and they need to discuss openly and publicly what can be done and be ready to hard fork Monero right before Qubic reach 51%.

Many people depends on Monero for their safety and use Monero daily, and even save in Monero. If the attack was successful, trust would be gone for good and by destroying the best privacy coin, we would be a step closer to CBDCs and it would be (another) sad day for freedom.