The math of attacking the non BTC pow chains seems crazy low. Most don’t really matter (litecoin/doge) but Monero is the biggest privacy by default chain and its loss would sadden me tbh
Ledger’s CTO claims sustaining the alleged 51% attack on Monero via Qubic costs $75M/day.
Off by about three orders of magnitude.
Monero’s actual daily security budget is simple to calculate:
- Tail emission of 0.6 XMR per block
- 720 blocks per day (2-minute intervals)
- XMR ≈ $253
That’s ~$109K/day - the total paid to all miners. This is the true economic incentive securing the network.
Qubic isn’t buying $75M/day worth of hardware or cloud compute. They’re just subsidizing existing Monero miners with their $QUBIC token, luring them into the pool during “idle” compute time.
I’ve run the numbers myself - they can sustain dominance for as little as $7K–$10K/day, nowhere near the inflated $75M figure.
Attacks like this expose a core vulnerability in smaller PoW networks: it’s not always about brute force hashrate sometimes you just need to pay miners more than the chain does.
And if Ledger’s CTO is off by three orders of magnitude on something as basic as Monero’s security budget… I shudder to think what bugs we’d find if we audited their elliptic curve implementation.
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