There is a network and all of crypto that I personally
love the most and that is Monero because more than it's technology it's community and I have here
with me Mr. X and Tuxedo of Cake Wallet to talk about what's been going on with Monero. There's
a lot of fun happening within Monero and it's led me to the conclusion that there's been an
orchestrated attack against Monero. So I want to welcome Tuxedo and Mr. X. How are you guys
doing today? Doing great thanks for having me. So Mr. X as you know is my partner at the Crypto
Vigilante and Tuxedo works with Cake Wallet. What's your position with Cake Wallet? What do you do
with Cake Wallet? I'm kind of a designer developer. I help a lot with UI design, designing like the
interface for new features and then I do a little bit of infrastructure management here and
there and a little bit of development but mostly involved with designing. Awesome. So
given that there's a lot of people asking questions as to what's happening with Monero,
could you Tuxedo, could you please take us through a brief synopsis as to what has happened
with Monero, with Cubic and everything that they're claiming to have accomplished of a 51%
attack, which really is not? Yeah, so there's this chain, Cubic, and they had a lot of talk
a couple months ago. Some people picked it up. A lot of people ignored it. Some people purposefully
ignored it because they could see early on that they just wanted attention.
And then somewhere along the line they decided they were going to start
kind of mining Monero at certain times, depending on what they want to do with their network.
But recently, a couple days ago, I think it was coming into August 11th, so August 10th,
very late at night, they claimed that they successfully executed over 51% of the total
network hash rate on Monero, which we can easily verify is not true. They are a concerning force,
I would say. They do have a decent amount of hash rate, which at peak times did look like it got
between 35% and 40%. It's hard to tell exactly because they aren't giving us really truthful
numbers on their part on their own hash rate. And then, of course, the total network hash rate.
But they have had enough hash rate that's been a concern because they have been able to screw with
the network a certain amount. And we have seen a couple reasonably deep reorgs. We saw a couple
six block reorgs and we saw a single seven block reorg, which is definitely not ideal,
but their claims are false on 51% attack. They did not actually get that high of a hash rate.
And so because of that, they couldn't do anything seriously damaging like fork the chain or do
double spend attacks. So that's kind of a brief overview of what happened. I guess over the
past couple of days. So do these reorgs do they affect Monero at all? Because
in conversations with Mr. X, and maybe Mr. X can answer this,
there is Monero has almost like a security measure of 10 blocks of time where we have
to wait around 20 minutes to process another transaction from your wallet, which is almost
like a feature of security. And since they were not able to go beyond that 10 block
a space and time, I guess the situation wasn't as serious as it could have been.
Mr. X, maybe you can explain more about that or Tuxedo?
Yeah, I mean, the bad part would be is if they did actually get 51% and they were able to
do reorgs larger than 10 blocks, because then I could actually screw with people spending their XMR.
Now they still can screw with the network doing smaller reorgs. So for example,
if you had sent a transaction in blocks that were then got reorg to their empty blocks that
they were mining, your transaction would end back in the mem pool as my understanding.
And if you are a service that does only accept a few comps, if you wait only a few
confirmations before giving out a product or giving out whatever it is you do,
that could have affected you potentially there. But if you're using Monero as it's been
specced out as it's intended, yes, you are correct. That is why there is a 10 block lock
for exactly reasons like this. There is 10 blocks until you are able to spend the
outputs again. So if I send you some XMR, you have to wait 10 blocks before you can
actually spend that again for this very reason. Okay. So given that they were able to achieve up
to a seven block reorg, is there a concern that they could go further?
Yeah, there is concern that they could go further for sure, depending on what kind of
improved incentives they can provide for mining on cubic. To me, it doesn't look like they've
actually managed to take that much existing hash rate from Monero, but they have got a lot of new
hash rate in that has been adding up quite a lot over the past several weeks, I would say.
And depending on what happens, they do have a chance that they could potentially pull even more
in. But I will also say that Cubics' reward emission is having, to my understanding, they
will be less profitable. Okay. And will it still be more profitable than mining Monero
even after the halving? Yeah, it will be just because you're getting that cubic reward as well,
but it won't be as profitable as it is now unless the coin, unless it pumps a lot, and then it
could potentially make up for it. But I don't necessarily see that happening. It has pumped
a good amount over the past month because of this media attention that they've been working at.
But they'll have a lot to make up for that halving. So I was having a conversation with Mr. X yesterday,
and I said, hey, why don't people just mine cubic and with the proceeds buy more Monero?
And then he told me that Arctic Mine came up with that as a possible option that people
have in the market. But then again, it's like, well, then you're still kind of aiding a pool that
could cause harm to the network. Yeah, it's kind of a double-edged sword because it's like, yeah,
you'll improve the price of Monero potentially. But then just immediately you're dumping the
cubic coin, which is de-incentivizing their price and their profitability and you're
bumping up Monero. But at the same time, you're giving them hash rate, which then
can bring to that concern of could they actually get to 51%. So it's kind of an interesting idea.
And I could see it being beneficial as long as the hash rate does remain under a certain amount.
But we can see even though they haven't 51%, they haven't gotten there. They've gotten around 36%,
maybe 40%. It's hard to tell exactly. Even then they're still able to screw with the network
a little bit and cause a lot of concern. Like once again, it's not the end of the world,
what they're saying, what their claims are online is largely false. There's this image that's been
going around that is showing 2.8 gigahash a second on their pool and then like 5.3 gigahash total
network hash rate and then 52% of the total network hash. But what we know is if we actually
take a look at miningpoolstats.stream, which is a good reliable website that they just check
public APIs that these pools provide, and they can look into their hash rate and see
details and create charts on like how much hash rates gone over like the past week.
If we actually take a look over the past seven days of history, what we see is that
pool mining has not gone below like alternative to cubic, all the other pools together has not
gone below 3.7 gigahash. And to actually 51%, of course, it's not that you take the existing
hash rate, cut it in half, and then do that. You have to literally double the entire network's
hash rate. And so if cubic actually did 51%, they would have had to match that and then add a
little bit to it. And we didn't see that happening. We saw them get up to assuming their
numbers are correct. I have reason to believe that they might be lying given what they're
claiming so far. But with their number of 2.8 gigahash, they're still at least missing
at least 1 gigahash. I think they're probably missing at least a couple gigahash, which is a
lot. That's a lot more to add, and that costs a lot of money. So yeah, they're concerning
to a degree. And yeah, they've gotten a good amount of hash, but they're lying. And I kind
of think the reason they're doing this is, I mean, there's a lot of speculation. We don't
know exactly the reason. But I think part of the reason they're lying right now is that
by doing this right now and taking advantage of this situation to try and lie about their 51%
attack, they can actually make it easier to do a real 51% attack in the future. Because by spreading
all this fud and all this propaganda, they're actually managed to drive the price down of
Monero a little bit. Well, I wouldn't say a little bit, actually a good amount. Monero's down,
I think 10% over the past seven days. And by doing that, they're actually making it easier
for them to 51% attack if they wanted to. Because if the price of Monero keeps falling,
like miners who mine on the existing pools, they might just drop out. And it's not that the
hash rates tied directly to the price. But Monero isn't, it's reasonably profitable,
but if it falls back to 200, it'll lose a lot of profitability. And some of these miners
might drop out. And that's just going to make it even easier for them. So I think that's
partially why they're doing this push and this lie right now. Ultimately, why cubic is doing this?
I don't really know. I think you guys probably have some interesting theories,
maybe coordinated attack. It might just be a disenfranchised individual who wants to pump
their shitcoin and make some money. Don't really know. But one of the things that they are
using is that they managed to mine 51 blocks within this arbitrary 100 block period. And
they're using that to say that we got a 51% attack. But really, that was kind of luck. Like,
you're able to do that because of how the distribution works. You're able to do that with luck
with around like 30 to 40% of hash rate. That's not totally unreasonable. They got lucky, sure.
But just because they got 51 out of 100 blocks for this arbitrary period of time,
that does not mean that they actually 51%ed the total hash rate of the network.
So one of the best things that the Monero community has always had going for itself is the
culture of honesty that you guys have always fostered. And that's very rare in crypto because
everyone is ready to show you why their network is the best. Whereas the Monero person, it's
almost in their adherence to the falsethos, they're more ready to tell you what could
possibly go wrong in the future. And it's a very special culture. And because of that culture,
you guys, the audience can see how tuxedo is so all candid and honest. But that is a virtue that
the Monero community has. And I just wanted to point that out that even in this conversation,
the way you've expressed yourself and talked about it, that's really like what makes Monero
powerful, in my opinion, is that there's a notion of trust and a reverence for the falsethos.
So that's what makes me love Monero is really the culture, that mindset.
And the first thing that comes to mind is, and you mentioned that we could have various
theories about this, but do you know who funded cubic? Who's behind it? What entities? I've tried
to do research on this. I really couldn't find anything. I even went on CrunchBase and tried
to figure out who these guys were. Who was funding this? Where did it come from? I didn't have any
luck. Do you, Mr. X, or do you tuxedo? Do you guys have an idea of where cubic comes from?
Mr. X has any information. I'd love to hear what he has to say. I did see some information.
I think some of it wasn't true that there was potentially some US-Israeli joint venture funding
that I guess somebody managed to get out of Grock. But I haven't confirmed that claim. I don't
know how much of that is actually true. But beyond that, I haven't really looked into their
funding that much. But it would be very interesting to actually dig a little deeper
and find out. But if Mr. X has any info on that, I'd love to hear what he has to say.
Yeah. I don't really have anything else. Like you mentioned, I did see that AI-generated theory
with the Israeli firms and stuff, but that was, I don't know if that, I didn't see any evidence
of it. It was just some rumor on Twitter or something, I think.
So what's strange is that this happens right at the time where we see a lot of the listings
of Monero. Maxi, there's a bunch of like four or five different exchanges that have recently
delisted Monero. Or actually, no, they withheld withdrawals. They haven't delisted it completely,
but they withheld withdrawals. What's going on there? Do you guys have an idea of what's going
on there? They're withholding withdrawals of Monero from many exchanges.
Yeah. I actually noticed this on another exchange, and this was over a week ago,
actually, when there was first some of these headlines about the upcoming, or I guess,
back when Cubic was threatening the 51% attack and saying that they would, I think, was back.
And they said on August 2nd, we will execute the 51% attack. And then they
like expanded their window to like the whole month of August, I think. But back then there was,
I noticed at least one exchange that was not allowing deposits or withdrawals of Monero
being said due to recent news headlines or something. And there was a minor exchange,
a safe trade, I believe, but which is not very well known. I think they have,
they have other small cap coins, or they have them tarry. Actually, they were one of the
early ones to list tarry, which is how I was aware of them. But as far as large exchanges,
to my knowledge, I think Kraken had a brief outage. And then, but there as last I checked
earlier today, they're still online, fully operational with Monero deposits and withdrawals.
And then as far as other exchanges, I did notice there were some other ones that did have some
outages. Tuxedo, you probably have more details on that.
No, I mean, I kind of, I kind of noticed the same thing. Yeah, Kraken's the one that like,
and this is kind of how I know Kraken's more legit is that they're, they're really good
about this. They, I checked multiple times during this whole thing, and you could deposit and withdraw,
but they were taking the proper precautions and requiring 10 confirmations, which is totally fine.
But there was a lot of exchanges that did disable deposits and withdrawals, to my knowledge,
altogether. And, you know, you could say maybe that's out of safety, but
like withdrawals makes a lot less sense than deposits, disabling deposits, or at least making
them require full 10 confirmations makes total sense. Disabling withdrawals is a little more
questionable. Now, maybe they actually were convinced that cubic was going to do a 51%. And in that,
in that sense, yeah, you might, you might do that to try and prevent people from moving funds during
like a time that might be questionable. But it is interesting that by doing that,
they're basically forcing people to only sell. I mean, people could buy if they wanted to,
but during this time, if people wanted to withdraw due to like fear of like having their
money on the exchange, they can't do that. They get rid of it, they have to just sell it.
And we've seen this happen in the past with like, especially Binance, Binance was notorious for
basically not holding any money out at any time. And eventually, when they decide they're going
to remove it, they disabled withdrawals incredibly quickly, forcing people to sell
because people wanted to get their coin off of Binance because they're going to remove it.
And then they disabled withdrawals for, I think, weeks on end, forcing people to sell,
basically causing a false price movement, essentially.
At the same time, guys, we see that there's a lot of energy being put in by
some of the top BTC developers around that work with BitVM, promoting the idea that
the Lightning Network is more private than Monero, to the point that just like a week or two ago,
we had a debate on Monero Talk. And I thought that that was kind of strange that so much emphasis
is going on trying to, it's almost like the BTC crowd really feels as if, and this
not just any BTC crowd, it's the BTC crowd that is heavily backed by venture capital,
they feel threatened by Monero. The fact that they feel like it's important for them to send
out developers like SuperTestnet to debate, to make that claim, which is ludicrous that
the Lightning Network is more private than Monero, it's ridiculous. So that is really,
that's really eye-opening, right? It makes me question motives and what's really going on here.
And at the same time, we have a character like Nick Fuentes going out on the national stage
who now he has a huge audience, a huge following. I'd say that he's probably
probably the most significant figure in politics right now in general. And he,
he's shilling Monero to his audience. And I think he's going to continue to
shill Monero to his audience because he sees value in Monero. And he himself talked about how
Monero has been attacked and is being attacked. So,
so many things are just happening. A lot of energy is moving around Monero.
And do you guys, what do you guys think? Do you guys suspect that this is part of like a
coordinated effort to try to hurt the network? Do you guys, is that something, is that a gut
feeling that you guys have as well? Or, or is this all just happenstance coincidences?
I mean, we, we know that there's been, and I, if you follow body and our guest,
he's done tons of deep dives. He's got so much useful information. He's done a lot of investigation
into the legitimate price suppression of Monero by exchanges, like I mentioned,
like Binance. So we know there has legitimately been some coordinated attacks against Monero
to try and make it less interesting. Because if they can just keep suppressing
the price, they can prevent it from like pumping during these bull runs. And if they can get people
like for instance, this whole cubic thing, like if you look at it by itself, it might just look like
some individual trying to make a quick buck or screw with the community. But if you take a broader
look at things and you see all these other things going on, it does start to paint a larger picture
that there might be some coordination going on. It might be a more orchestrated attack
than what we initially would realize, attacking basically the trust in the network, attacking
the price at the same time, basically trying to maybe not destroy it outright, but kind of shun
it out of the limelight, right? Try to put so much fear out there that people suddenly become
less interested in it and kind of just stick it in a corner over here to try and keep it from
becoming too popular. And I think in a lot of ways they've been successful about that.
I think in some ways they haven't been. And I think it really went against that when we saw
that BTC hacker who attempted to swap what I believe was around $300 million, I think he
only got around $30 million. He tried to swap that into Minero and suddenly the price absolutely
skyrocketed and Minero got more media attention than it ever had in I think the last couple
years. So I think they want to prevent that from happening. So if they can't
suppress the price, they're going to now go after the network and try to
have people lose faith in the network, lose trust in the network. Because if they can convince,
like you were saying, they can convince people that lightning is more private than Minero,
then you won't see something like this happen again, where people are going to swap
tons of Bitcoin into Minero for safekeeping or for hiding funds or doesn't have to be
malicious. But if they can spread enough propaganda and FUD, they might prevent that
from happening in the end. And we've seen this in the past with Binance holding paper
with Minero and basically selling and shorting Minero and buying at a certain times and selling
it stuff like that. So is it actually coordinated? It's hard to fully know. Hopefully more
information will come out about Cubic and where their actual funding is. We have some hints,
we don't fully know. But it's very possible because the state doesn't like Minero. It
goes against everything they want to do. They're okay with Bitcoin because if
they're traceable, as we know this, and even cryptos like Ethereum and Bitcoin that are
initially traceable, that have some privacy tools, they've gone off of those privacy tools
individually. Now, it's going to be a lot harder to go after Minero. But if they're
going to do it, some of these things they're doing is having a little bit of effect.
And I'd love to hear from Mr. X if he wants to add to that.
Well, yeah, a lot of these, the chain of events, including like the trade ogre
going down mysteriously for, I guess, what's been more than a couple weeks now, I think,
because it was late July when it went down without any explanation. Officially,
lots of rumors though. But some people are thinking that maybe they're dumping coins or
maybe there was a government seizure action that occurred. But I did see, in regards to the
Intel blockchain analytics firm had mapped out what they believe to be the trade ogre wallets,
for obviously the transparent surveillance coins, but all the privacy coins, those are all,
we don't really know what's going on with those. And I did hear rumors about WoWNero being dumped,
or I mean it was dumped, I guess, shortly after that happened. But some people are
saying that maybe they sold their, the trade ogre operators may have dumped their holdings,
their customer holdings in that action potentially. So there's definitely a lot of rumors
going around about all this stuff. But yeah, I agree. The kind of all these events kind of
lining up and happening around the same time, attacking the network itself and then attacking
the privacy and then also you have the samurai wallet developers coming to this recent plea,
guilty plea agreement there, which is not good for, even though it doesn't really carry precedent,
I guess, because it wasn't adjudicated by the judge, but it was rather just this plea agreement
that still is not good because it's just kind of putting that idea out there that these
software developers who simply make peer-to-peer, self-custody cash,
any privacy preserving projects are viewed as suspicious. So even though I guess the one thing
there is that they did make profit off of the, and it was more of a centralized protocol
rather than Monero, which is completely decentralized and there's no profit
that's made by the developers. But in any case, though, I think just that idea that
privacy is somehow tainted in a bad thing rather than a fundamental human right is definitely,
I think, part of the state's attack against Monero in a more roundabout way, I guess,
even though, but then, of course, we have obviously with this cubic,
yeah, there's definitely a lot of speculation of, is that like a government that's behind that,
or where's the funding coming from? But that's definitely another angle of attack,
which is the network itself. So my question is, an entity with more resources, couldn't they
spin up more GPUs and CPUs and cause even a bigger attack, the way that cubic is showing
them that it is possible? Yeah, potentially. And that's one of the, I think, one of the good
things that actually comes out of this. Because ultimately, if cubic can't actually get to a
51%, they kind of have helped us in a way like these attacks on Monero, these are not new. We
have these things happen quite often, actually. But I don't know if you remember last year,
there was a transaction spam attack, which was maybe a black marble attack, we don't really know.
But there was a very, very large amount of transactions that occurred very short period of
time for like very, very low fee. And there were some bugs discovered with how fee calculation
was handled and ended up getting fixed. So ultimately, it did improve the resiliency.
I'm hoping that we see that happen with cubic as well. We already have people like Luke
Parker, who's one of the more prominent Monero developers. He's the lead developer of Sorai.
But he's done a lot of work for Monero on the past. And he opened a kind of a meta issue
discussing potential ways that we can make the network more resilient to a 51% attack
if that were to happen, like using stuff like a finality layer or allowing GPU mining,
stuff like that. But that is one of the concerns that does come up from this,
is that in reality, Monero's hash rate is relatively low, and it is relatively inexpensive
for an individual or like especially like the state, right? So like an organization like
Cubic is one thing, but then the state, it is relatively inexpensive if they wanted to
screw with the network or if they even wanted to try to go for 51%, they could undoubtedly
do it if they really wanted to. And then that raises the question of well, what do we do
to deal with that? And one of the things that people have been doing is promoting mining,
trying to get people to use a peer to pool, which is basically a decentralized pool and then
renting hash rate, which all these things help, all these things help, sure. But there's probably
something else that we can do to further make it resilient, like maybe making fees higher to
incentivize miners to use Monero instead of going to Cubic. And then maybe using some
of these things that Luke Parker brought up, like the finality layer, I think that was one that was
prominently talked about in one of the recent Monero Topia episodes. So there are some things that
are being investigated and looked at to try and make this better. Like the one thing that you
can do right now, if you're just someone who's like looking into this conversation is just
if you've got a computer sitting around, especially if it's a reasonably powerful one,
like a gaming computer, just start mining on peer to pool, assuming that your electricity
isn't too expensive, start mining peer to pool, and you'll get some KYC-free Monero. It's not like
you're just spending money to put all this hash rate on the network. You're actually getting
something back. Now, you may or may not make profit, but you are getting KYC-free Monero,
which in my opinion is quite valuable. Yeah. So has there been any conversation of maybe,
has anyone brought up the issue of that maybe random X was a bad idea and that
Monero shouldn't have been ASIC resistant, shouldn't have gone that route? Because there are many,
when we had the, when we moved into random X back then, a lot of people in Monero were,
you know, did not want to go the ASIC resistant route. Has that come up in conversation?
Yeah. That was one of the options that was raised on Luke's meta issue was the possibility
of allowing ASICs are going to a different algorithm. But I think it carries, you know,
some different issues, but it carries some similar issues in a way to where
it can become very centralized very quickly. Ironically, one of the advantages of Monero's
hash rate being low is that it is easier for you at home to make a difference. Now, obviously,
having the hash rate be lower is, you know, ultimately could potentially be a problem,
but it does allow you to make a difference because the best thing to mine Monero on is literally an
AMD Ryzen consumer processor. So at home, you can actually make a reasonable difference. With
Bitcoin, what we see is that you've got to spend $10,000 to make any meaningful
hash rate because of the ASICs and the centralization that's become around that.
So that has been discussed, but I'm sure Mr. X has something he can say on that as well.
Well, yeah, I was going to say that that ASIC idea is on the list. If you look at Github on the
Monero Project Research Lab section on Github there at the most recent, one of the most recent
issues from Kaibor Nerve or Luke Parker is the, as a table with, as Tuxedo mentioned,
the finality layer is the first one that was there. And then he also has several other
solutions like including the ASIC proof of work. But as Tuxedo said, that is the problem with
if Monero was to switch completely over to that then there would be a risk of that centralization.
And then actually one of the things, if we go back a few years, I remember when they had the,
I think it was the Bitmain, I can't remember was it, I forget what the name of the model
was, but it was that so-called ASIC for Monero that has-
The X5, right? The Miner X5?
Yes, the Miner X5, that's the one. And it had a bunch of these powerful CPUs on it that
gave, I forget how many kill hashes it was quite a bit, but it was pretty,
at the time, I think they were selling it at loss actually, allegedly from what I heard.
But the problem with that though, they actually mined with those devices secretly
before they sold them. So they sold a bunch and people found dust inside the chips and
stuff and how the improving that they had been used. And also it was pretty obvious too from the
get the hash rate data that they were mining with those devices before they sold them.
So that is another risk that you can have some mining companies secretly
mining or even if they were bright by the government they could use it to attack
Minero. So I think that's definitely a risk if we were to switch to something like that.
But another thing that I was just thinking of and I briefly discussed with Rafael was
looking at Pirate Chain. I know it's kind of, at least in most of the Minero communities,
kind of thinks of it as kind of not everybody, but there's some that kind of disregard it
as kind of a joke, but not really serious. But I think the idea of the delegated proof
of work, if we were to look into that more, if I know that they have notarized their blockchain
data regular intervals on Komodo and then also on I think Litecoin as well. So in order to try to
reorganize or do deep reorganizations past those intervals, I mean they would not be able
to do it unless they were to overpower both of those other blockchains, hash power. So they'd
attack or would actually have to attack all three networks simultaneously to override those
transactions. So I was just wondering if that is another idea that maybe could be added to that.
I mean of course, this is some of the probably best to ask
proposed to Minero Research Lab. That's just another idea I thought of that might be
worth looking at. Yeah, I think I guess one of the main, maybe not a concern,
but one of the upsets of that would be similar to the suggestion like on the on Luke Parker's table,
which was merge mining with Litecoin is that in a way you kind of become partially beholden to
that network as well, even if there's added security. I know Minero wants to be survive on
its own essentially, fully decentralized in its own network. So you could maybe get
security from another network, but you're kind of partially becoming beholden to them as well.
So it's, you know, has its own pros and cons. Well, yeah, I know Pyrochain, one of the things
that they've talked about is that even if Komodo and Litecoin were both to become obsolete or no
longer use, then that wouldn't cause Pyrochain to stop working. It would just, they would no
longer use that have that added security. So they wouldn't have to attack those. It would
just default to just using just I guess Pyrochain's proof of work itself. I think
Equahash is what they use, I recall correctly, which is the same as what Zcash uses
for their proof of work algorithm. But anyway, just an idea I thought might be
worth looking at or looking into further. So it seems to me like the big issue here is
financial incentives. And in crypto, the financial incentives can change overnight.
I think that something as easy as a meme, you know, looking at Monero as a meme could
drive up the price and help secure the network. So it really comes down to being creative. And
it is concerning that maybe a state level actor could jump in and cause damage in the way that
Cubic has. So my question is like, what's the timeline? So I see Kayaba Nerve is putting out
these proposals. What is the process of going through these proposals? And how will the community
come to a consensus in figuring out what to do next? How to mitigate any possible risk into the
future? I imagine Mr. X can probably give a better answer than I can. But I know there has to be,
my understanding is that there has to be a consensus with the core team. And if it is
something that requires a hard fork, they'll have to plan that out. Either doing a different
scheduled hard fork one sooner, if it's, you know, something that needs to be addressed
earlier, or maybe doing it with the existing planned hard fork, if it's something that
requires a hard fork. Yeah, from my understanding, a lot of these, I mean,
people interested can just go on like Matrix or AirSeven or whatever to just share in the various
chats, like jump in the Monero. There's official chats, I think, linked from the Monero official
Monero website where people can jump into these actual discussions with the people that were
mentioned, like Luke Parker and other members of the research lab or core team, you can jump in
those conversations and share these ideas and discuss them. So when I read what the top dev
at Cubic is saying, he's saying that he's actually helping the Monero community get ready for any
would-be state-sponsored attack. What are your guys' thoughts about that? Could this guy be
actually benevolent helping out the Monero community? Well, that would be a more plausible
if they weren't just straight up lying about their statistics and what they're doing
and causing all this fud. Ironically, he could end up being right if we end up doing something
that greatly improves the 51% resistance. But I have a really hard time believing that,
seeing what they were saying earlier on, they were saying a lot more threatening things.
I don't have exact quotes, but I do distinctly remember them trying to come out as a threat
in a way. And now they've kind of backtracked and they're like, oh, we're actually helping
Monero. And I have a hard time believing that because of them lying about they're actually
51%ing, because if they were actually going to help Monero, they wouldn't try to also
drive the price down. And they also would be giving this hash rate to peer-to-pool. Instead of having
their own pool, they would start giving a bunch of hash rate at peer-to-pool. Now, maybe they're,
like you're saying, he's trying to help it to prepare us for a state attack. But once again,
it doesn't make sense why he's lying about this 51%. There's no reason to do that.
If he's actually trying to help Monero, there's no reason to lie about them
51%ing, attacking it. The only reason I could think of doing that is once again to try and
add distrust in Monero as a network into pump the Cubic coin and make Cubic mine even more
profitable. And there's some other theories potentially like he's in bed, Cubic is in
bed with some of these exchanges that delisted Monero. And the Cubic coin is on these exchanges
that delisted Monero and maybe there's something going on where they're trying to fill a
bunch of Monero shorts to make people money. I don't really know. But there's a lot of
potential theories about why or what they're doing and why, but I have a really hard time
believing that they're actually trying to help Monero just because of the fact of what all
they're lying about. They've been lying about a lot of stuff, their hash rate, their 51% attack.
And every time they do and then they get caught lying, they just kind of backtrack,
like they're doing now. They're like, oh, the reason why we didn't actually do anything
bad is because we're actually trying to help Monero. We don't want to hurt it.
But in reality, they couldn't do anything bad because they didn't actually 51% it.
So I just have a hard time believing that it's a little bit funny.
So it makes me very happy that the culture of Monero is now something that doesn't seem
will ever change. And that these newer generation of contributors have carried on the legacy of what
it means to be part of this network of carrying on with that honesty. And just notice how you
yourself looked for honesty as the litmus test as to like, can we trust it, right?
And so, which is the complete opposite of what cubic is portraying, right? So it's a
the culture is so important, you know, in all of this.
Tuxedo, are you there? Okay, yeah, your screen froze for a second.
We are about a month away from the Crypto Vigilante Summit, where we're going to talk about what
matters most in crypto. And I'm pretty sure this topic is going to come up. And my question to
you guys is like, what do you guys expect a month from now? How do you guys, what do you
guys expect to be resolved or how will this evolve in the upcoming month?
I'm hoping that cubic is less of a threat. Obviously, we don't really know what's going
to happen. Once again, they have that halving on August 20th, that'll make mining cubic,
you know, a lot a good amount less profitable. And then of course, it also depends on what
the price of the token is. Apparently, they're going to attempt another attack
Thursday or tomorrow, basically. So I'm ramping up some mining rigs to, you know, try and offset
some of that. Because you got to remember that every hash rate that you add, they have to
basically double that. So even if you're adding, maybe you think you're not adding that much,
maybe you're adding like 10 kilo hash. Well, suddenly they have to have another extra
20 kilo hash to basically make up for that. So every little bit
matters. But if you want to actually make a decent difference, I would say
rent some mining rigs. You can easily do this from, I think it's called miningrigrentals.com.
You can get quite a lot of hash rate for cheap. So that's a decent way to put a dent
in there. But if you have some hardware sitting around, you know, just use it.
Mine, Peer to Pool, get paid, Seminero. But yeah, hopefully the situation will cool off a bit.
It seems like they're going to try ramping up some more attacks. So I guess we'll have to see what
happens. And so these attacks are going to be attempting the same, what they already did or
what are they threatening to do? That's my understanding. I think they might be
doing some more things to try and hide their hash rate a little bit.
Some people are like basically spying in their discord. I'm not in there and they have a little
more details as to what they're planning X. I'm not actually in there. But my understanding is
that they're going to continue performing this attack, doing the selfish mining. And that's
something I want to also mention. The reason why they are such a problem, like as we see
right now, we do have some pools that have pretty large hash rate, which is not as ideal,
but it's not as big of a deal. For instance, the top pool I think has around 29, 30% of the total
hash rate, but it's a legit pool that's been around for a long time and they, to my knowledge,
have never done any funny business. The reason why Cubic is able to do so much
screwy stuff with just 35 to 40% hash rate is because of their selfish mining strategy.
Basically, they're mining on their own. They're not mining in combination with these other
people. They're kind of mining blocks on their own. And if they can come up with blocks sooner,
then the other pools can. They can kind of stack them in a way in which they can
deliver them to the network. And suddenly the network has to reorg because it sees that
there were these valid blocks that were mined before the other pools did. And that's kind
of what causes this whole issue with the reorgs is because they're going out of their way to
mine in this selfish manner. So I imagine they're going to continue trying that.
They might have something else up their sleeve. I've been seeing anything about that. I don't know
if Mr. X has any extra information about what kind of attacks they might be planning.
I saw a flood about empty blocks, but I think that might have just been because the mempool
was empty because there was, oh, well, there just weren't any transactions at that time.
So when some of them were found, but I did see people flooding about, oh, no,
they're mining empty blocks. I'm a narrow and holding back people's transactions and stuff.
I'm not sure that was entirely accurate. But yeah, I did see the six and seven reorgs.
But as you mentioned earlier, they were below that 10 block
lock time, which is there for a reason. So I'm not super worried about it.
But I would say, yeah, like you mentioned, going up to August 20th, I would definitely be
watching and like you mentioned, if they're threatening something tomorrow,
yeah, just firing up some more Ryzen or whatever processors you might have available to help defend.
And actually, this is interesting. And I should also mention to do that easily
for people who might not be comfortable with command lines.
There's a open source tool called, I'm not even sure how you pronounce it,
if it's Goopax or gupax.io is the website. And it is a GUI for Mining Monero on a P2 pool
using XMR or XM rig or mining software. And it does it pretty efficiently if you have
the hardware for that. So I do recommend checking that out.
Awesome. Well, we're going to put that in the description below, Mr. X, if you could please
DM me the link to that. And again, how, what I really want to know is that how
concerned are you guys with this whole cubic thing over Monero? Are you guys concerned at all
or not really or what's going on? I mean, cubic themselves is a little bit concerning.
But I think outside of cubic, just seeing this happen raises some bigger
questions about how we can become more resilient. So cubic overall, they're a concern,
but I'm nowhere close to saying, oh, it's over. They're going to destroy the network.
This was bound to happen at some point. And so ultimately, I do strongly believe
this will turn into something beneficial for Monero. Whatever cubic's purpose might be,
I do believe this will turn into something beneficial. Because as you see, when attacks
start happening, that's when, so to speak, the game gets together. But we see a lot of
either previous developers or current developers start getting together, talking about solutions,
how to improve the network, make it more resilient. So I do strongly believe that this
this will be beneficial. Like the numbers they're getting to is definitely a little bit
concerning. But like Mr. X was saying, I think the home stretch really is over the next week
before that August 20th, because that having will significantly affect cubic's profitability.
If I'm understanding that's the day they're going to do it, that's what I've heard.
So they'll have a lot to make up with that in price if they want to maintain the same
profitability. And just got to keep spreading the word about mining really.
Yeah, it's not the most profitable thing right now. So it's kind of hard to get people on board
because people, you know, they want to be able to make profit on it. And Monero mining isn't really
profitable right now, unless you have like access to free electricity. And then, you know,
totally is. So getting more people aware of the fact that it's actually really easy to
mine, like Mr. X once again brought up goo packs. I use goo packs on several of my systems.
It's a lot nicer than sending up all the terminal tools. It's very easy. It's like
two clicks to set up. So if you're scared of doing it, don't be afraid. It's super easy.
And you can run it on basically any system, Linux, macOS, or if you've got like a Windows gaming
computer run around, that's the perfect thing you can use to mine Monero and your idle time.
So kind of just getting the word out and then also dispelling the FUD too. I've been
spending probably way too much time trying to do that. But dispelling the FUD when you see it,
because while it doesn't affect like everything, seeing all of these journalists and all these
reports of like 51% attack does have an effect on the price. And as we can see, it has been like
there's probably some other stuff going on, like maybe trader is selling off, we don't know.
But it does have an effect on the price. And even if like retail doesn't care that much,
this is all the institutional investors see, right? They see like this news of this 51%
attack and then that looks really bad. And I do have knowledge that retail actually is largely
buying Monero and retail largely has not been flooded, because I do have knowledge that
so within KQAL specifically, a lot of our swap providers have actually seen an uptick in Monero
exchanges and swaps and not off ramping Monero, but actually getting Monero. So they've actually
seen an uptick in getting Monero during this price drop. So a lot of retail is taking
advantage of it. And so I think it plays into the further part of how Monero really is just
it's really one of the only used cryptos, like it's the only one that people actually take
seriously for the original purpose of cryptocurrency. And it has big, I'll say it has like
it's still relatively niche, but it has reasonable retail adoption, especially compared to other
cryptocurrencies, which have like way larger market cap. So I'm bullish on retail, but the price has
been affected and I'm sure there's a lot of larger investors that have kind of started dump it based
on this news. But I think it's just dispelling the fud, getting people to mine. And then, you know,
talking about these solutions of what can we do to improve minor profitability? So maybe raising
the fee, that's an option that's been talked about. And then these various things to
try and limit the risk of a 51% attack as well. So we'll see more and more of this stuff come out as
some of these developers, much smarter people talk about some of these potential solutions. And
hopefully, we'll hear more about this soon. Mr. Rex, what do you think? Are you are you concerned
at all as to what's happening? What's going on? Yeah, I'm not. I mean, I largely agree with
what Tuxedo said. I'm not super worried, especially not. I mean, just based on the
numbers and also the fact that Cubic has been basically lying for a lot of this time to get a
lot of this this news flow that's not even accurate about the saying that that they successfully
executed the 51% attack when that did not happen. But I think, but yeah, like it is kind of
demoralizing for people that don't understand that that is incorrect information that are
looking at because when you look at like trading view, for example, it does have a lot of these
inaccurate news headlines all sitting there. And people think that is what's going on. So
they're panic selling, in some cases, for those who just don't understand what's actually happening.
But um, but yeah, I would say I do think it is going to take a bit for them. I mean,
for Cubic, if they're for them to try to accumulate, that's a lot more hash rate for
them to get. So they'd either have to buy a lot of hash rate rented, or or somehow convince
a lot of miners to switch over to them. And I mean, I did see a video of a minor that was
excited. This was like a week ago or so that they were all talking about how Cubic is paying out
all this extra money and stuff. But I don't know. I mean, how much longer they can continue doing
that or these extra bonuses. So especially if there's a happening occurring, if that is
correct, that that's happening on the 20th, that's definitely going to cut those profits down.
So yeah, I'm kind of in a wait and see approach and definitely would encourage those to mine
to help defend the network, of course, but also it is encouraging to see some of the
discussions about the potential solutions. And I think yeah, that's, I guess, yeah,
we'll see what happens with that. But as of now, like I said, they have not successfully
executed a 51% attack at this point. So so I'm not super worried, really that really that word,
I guess. And I do kind of think this is a time I mean, if people are like trying to get into
an arrow, I mean, it's the prices drop quite a bit, or pretty much almost almost in half
from the all time high of 420 will not all time high, sorry, the recent high of 420.
So yeah, I would definitely think this is a time I'm like Monero definitely could use some
price support for to and in order for it to really become more profitable, the price does need to go
up. So so I would say yeah, this is probably a good time to grab some Monero and also to mine.
Awesome. So giving your guys is experience with Monero. How long what do you guys expect
to be the timeline for the devs to actually figure something out and execute it in the market
where Monero is more protected from all of this nonsense?
I can't really speak to that directly. I'm not as I guess in with the developer side as some
people was maybe Mr. X is. But my guess is basically that all depends on what happens
over the next week. If if it does become like oh yeah, this is this is getting pretty bad,
I imagine they will they will try to figure something out pretty quickly that can at least
help alleviate the situation, maybe not like, you know, totally solve it. Just trying to
prevent them from me only get to that point of 51%. And I imagine if it turns out, well,
you know, if Cubics really just been bluffing, they are totally unable to provide a 51%
because you're right, it is a lot of money. They're bleeding a lot of money to currently
do these various attacks, I guess paying people out and then spending all this extra money
incentivizing. And if they were to go out of their way, let's say they didn't get a
bunch of more miners on board and they didn't actually convert existing Monero miners to Cubic,
which seems like they haven't been able to do a ton of conversion. They would have to spend
a lot of money to add that extra hash rate themselves. And I think they would need around
like one and a half, two giga hashes depending on how much like I don't even think their
hash rate they're representing is even true. So I think they would need even more than
that to be honest. But that would cost a lot of money. So I think it all just depends
on what happens over the next week. If this thing is like they're bluffing and you know,
I think it'll blow off and then something will come along a little bit further down
the line, maybe a few months, maybe along with the next hard fork, something that can
approve. But in the short term, I could imagine fees getting increased fairly
significantly because that's an easy thing that can be done that can very quickly make
depending on the transaction amount that could help make miners more profitable,
help incentivize mining. Some of these things that don't require a hard fork,
I imagine those will be maybe prioritized in the event that it becomes a sketchy
situation over the next few days. Yeah, I'm actually just. Oh, sorry, I'm sorry,
you were saying? Oh, well, yeah, I was just checking on some of the chats there and they
were talking about how cubic was renting, allegedly renting hash rate and not even
getting as much hash as is, I mean, is well anywhere close to the 51% level at least.
But just, yeah, I think it's definitely the flood and the bots. There's definitely,
I've seen evidence of bots all saying the same thing in support of cubic and then all trying
to flood Monero too. So it's like, there's definitely a campaign against Monero. That's
definitely for sure. And personally, I think when I was just going to come out stronger out of
this thing, it's just really, this is kind of like a shit coin really just trying to flex
itself and pretend that, oh, yeah, we can take down this multi-billion dollar Monero, even
though we're only a few hundred million market cap. But I mean, I think it's just all, I mean,
as evidenced by their lives from cubic and inaccurate reporting, I think it's,
yeah, they're trying to make a name for themselves, but I just ultimately don't think they will
really hurt Monero. But I do, it doesn't mean we shouldn't be vigilant and we should continue
of course mining. And this is an opportunity really to help strengthen Monero
fundamentally. So I think, I ultimately do think that is what's going to happen as a result.
Yeah, I personally think that what's going to carry Monero through this and through everything
else is the adherence to the false ethos and the honesty and the reverence that
the community has to truth. So that's Monero superpower. And that's what,
I know Monero's in good hands. I get the same vibe from everyone that I meet in the
Monero community. They're just people that put their egos aside and they're more ready to tell you
anything, any possible thing that could go wrong with Monero than they are to show you
how great Monero is. It's almost the backwards of every other culture that I've encountered
in crypto and it is that culture which makes us very special, a very special environment.
So I'm personally not that worried, but I do want to follow up on this as it continues because
something that I learned from, I lived through the Bitcoin civil war and I was a big blocker.
And what I learned was that the technology doesn't matter as much. The economics doesn't
matter as much. What drives things is what people think and how they're informed and
thought can cause a lot of damage. So it's very important to have these conversations.
And I look forward to having you Tuxedo at the Crypto Vigilante summit coming up on September 12
where you're going to be showcasing a cake wallet and I look forward to your presentation.
This is going to happen again Friday, September 12. Everyone's welcome to join
at TCVSummit.com. All of the description is in the notes below here of this video.
And any final thoughts regarding this whole situation with Monero and Kubik
before we leave? Tuxedo? I think we had a good talk about the situation,
potential solutions and what's going on. But yeah, just the TLDR. Like we said,
mine if you can, if you have a spare system. If you want to throw, there's a lot of people
saying, how can I throw money at this? Go rent some hash rate on miningrigrentals.com.
You can get quite a lot of hash rate for pretty low money. And dispel the FUD, explain to people
what's going on. Like you were saying, we want to be truthful, but we also want to dispel the FUD.
So we are being realistic about Monero's potential downsize waves. It could be
attacked by the same time. We do want to dispel the FUD at the source. And this is
a lot of FUD. There's concern, but the 51% attack is a lie. So if you see that,
you've got the information now and you can look at this data yourself. Dispel that,
which will help, I guess, ensure trust in the network and let people know that, hey,
it's not actually that bad. It's not over. And to know that, something like Monero,
it's got a lot of good people behind it. And like you were saying, I'm sure it's
going to be just fine. I think it's going to get better. Awesome. Mr. Rex?
Yeah, I agree 100%. And actually, one thing, speaking of cake wallet and wallets in general,
of another area of FUD that came up today was the news about the Google Play Store banning
wallets that don't have a banking license, which initially was a bit worrisome, but then
of course, then thankfully, after the, I guess, the outrage about that, people, or I guess,
Google clarified that this would only apply to non-custodial wallets. So thankfully,
you won't have to, I guess, bypass the Play Store and download the APK or a Crescent or other
solutions to download some of our favorite wallets like Cake Wall, for example, which I use
very often. But yeah, just another interesting FUD issue that arose today as well that I thought
I'd mentioned. Awesome, guys. So I hope everything gets solved as soon as possible. And
yeah, I think that I'm very grateful for this conversation. Thank you for coming on,
Tuxedo. Thank you for coming on Mr. Rex. And until we meet again, peace, love, Anarchy.
Take care. Bye.
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