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The original was posted on /r/monero by /u/YogurtCloset3335 on 2025-08-29 03:49:23+00:00.

From Satoshi’s whitepaper:

We consider the scenario of an attacker trying to generate an alternate chain

faster than the honest chain. Even if this is accomplished, it does not

throw the system open to arbitrary changes, such as creating value out of

thin air or taking money that never belonged to the attacker. Nodes are

not going to accept an invalid transaction as payment, and honest nodes

will never accept a block containing them. An attacker can only try to

change one of his own transactions to take back money he recently spent.

If I understand it correctly, the main risk of a 51% attack is reversing transactions, aka double spending. Given that people are waiting a few blocks to confirm transactions, this risk seems low even with the current high orphaned block rate. Basically, valid transactions will take longer to confirm, and more blocks will be orphaned. Payment recipients are wise to wait for 6+ blocks after a transaction is sent and confirmed (and not in an orphan block), then there’s very low risk of a double spend.

The block orphaning costs miners money because of wasted effort, since there is no block reward for an orphaned block. And transactions from orphaned blocks will need to be mined into a new block, however this should occur automatically as miners are configured for this eventuality. So with the current 6% orphan block rate, mining should cost 6% more for everyone. A small percentage of transactions which end up in orphaned blocks will take a few hours to confirm.

Since Qubic can’t control 51% of hash, they’re trying to orphan as many blocks as they can. They accomplish this by ignoring the longest chain and mining on the previous block, racing to get their block accepted before the network confirms another valid block. This is more a nuisance than anything else. And surely it is costing them a lot of money. They’re mining at a gigahash/s or more, this wastes massive amounts of electricity for an essentially pointless act. And every orphan block they create costs them a lot of money.