Matthias Tarasiewicz

@exiledsurfer @Paralelni_polis 😱

The era of @Paralelni_polis in Prague comes to an end due to financial pressures and the property owner's decision. kryptomagazin.cz/en/paralelni-p…

‼️Looks like GrapheneOS is partnering with Motorola for the first non-Pixel supported device, based on a leak from a now-deleted post. ⤵️

"the future of the internet - and how to slop it" @zittrain

RIAT & decentral.community are organizing the Decentralized Internet and Privacy devroom at #Fosdem26. Live stream: Sunday, Feb 1, 2025. fosdem.org/2026/schedule/…

GrapheneOS is coming to Snapdragon. androidauthority.com/graphene-os-ma…

Free Software hasn't won dorotac.eu/posts/fosswon/

My talk from 2019 at HCPP in Prague still is very topical today: The Past, Present and Future of Opt-Out with Open and Libre Hardware youtu.be/jWRZfbWUszo?t=…

Is #hackintosh dying? "Technology, as such, makes nothing happen [...] It is rather the uses of technologies, and especially the communities established through these uses, that create the norm for technology appropriation and its social functions" reddit.com/r/hackintosh/c…

@MoneroTime Welcome back!

@P3b7_ This is incorrect. A selfish mining attack and 51% attack are two different things. While a 51% aims at a takeover (and should be demonstrated by a double spend), a selfish mining attack has the aim to extract the maximum of mining rewards by penalizing the other (honest) miners

@parasew x.com/P3b7_/status/1…

Monero appears to be in the midst of a successful 51% attack. The privacy-focused blockchain, launched in 2014 and long targeted by governments and 3-letters agencies, is already banned from most major centralized exchanges. The Qubic mining pool has been amassing hashrate for months and now controls a majority of the network. A major chain reorganization was detected this morning. With its current dominance, Qubic can rewrite the blockchain, enable double-spending, and censor any transaction. Sustaining this attack is estimated to cost $75 million per day. While potentially lucrative, it threatens to destroy confidence in the network almost overnight. Other miners are left with no incentive to continue, as Qubic can simply orphan any competing blocks, effectively becoming the sole miner. In effect, a $300 million market-cap chain is taking over a $6 billion one. Monero’s options for recovery are limited, and a full takeover is now possible and even likely. So far, XMR has dropped only 13%.

@alexmrkozlov Privacy is more amazing to me - but "convenience always beats security"

@Justin_Bons Do you mind updating your story with some facts? Here is a compilation of what happened. There was no 51% on Monero. riat.at/qubic-attack-o…

Monero was successfully attacked; XMR is now insecure & centralized Qubic can rewrite XMR history, censor & double-spend! Turns out a $300M PoS chain can "take over" a $6B PoW chain! PoS is that much better The attacks will continue, foreshadowing BTC's fall; PoW is cooked: 🧵 The Full Story: It all started out in May as a way to optimize profit for the Qubit validators, as they were able to dedicate spare compute cycles to mine XMR on the side (2% of XMR hashrate) This ended up being so successful that Qubic formalized its decision by June to fully integrate XMR to help fund the Qubic ecosystem. This led to the Qubic mining pool growing rapidly (10% of XMR hashrate) It was at this point that Qubic started offering additional token incentives for its pool. Attracting more of the pre-existing XMR miners to join. As Qubic was now able to offer 3x the reward of standard XMR pools! Only after all of this did Qubic publicly announce its intention to "take over" the XMR network! By late July, the Qubic hash rate was approaching a majority share (38% XMR hashrate) according to Qubic Qubic itself was framing this as a "demonstration of power" rather than a malicious attack. Calling it a "tech demo" for decentralized AGI computing... There were DDoS attacks against Qubic starting on the 5th of August, which slowed down Qubic's hashpower accumulation. This counterattack was not enough; As on the 11th of August, the "selfish miner" attacks began, which allowed the Qubic mining pool to reach a "majority" share of hashpower by the 12th of August: To prove their control over the network, they claimed to do a 6-block re-org. While orphaning over 60 blocks in the process. Some researchers have disputed this claim. What we do know is that they gained a majority share of hashpower over a 100-block time period. This absolutely does allow Qubic to rewrite XMR's history, destroying XMR's assumed immutability, censorship resistance & trustworthiness over that time period This also allows Cubic to carry out double-spend attacks, which could potentially defraud people, protocols & institutions out of a lot of money. Which is exactly why most major exchanges have suspended withdrawals & deposits. Because they run the risk of getting ripped off by Qubic if they choose to exploit this vulnerability The fact that they merely could have carried out such an attack over that time period is bad enough As of today, the price has dropped significantly & the hashrate has also dropped over 30%... Demonstrating the viscous cycle of a failing PoW system Qubic is framing itself as an ally of XMR & claims it only wanted to make a point & does not intend to attack XMR again... That this point can even be made in the first place is exactly what is so damning: Lessons Learned: The fact that the token incentives for a $300M PoS chain are sufficient to take over a $6B PoW chain speaks louder than words, proving PoW's inherent inferiority! That is what makes this a unique sneak peek into BTC's future, too Applying the token economics of a smaller PoS chain to fund a "51% attack" on a larger PoW chain is not something I had thought of before. The incentive of free "marketing" might even be enough to pull that off at that scale. As I most likely never would have talked about Qubic otherwise, & look at all of the attention we are giving it now! All PoW-based chains are vulnerable to this type of attack, because their security budget is so abysmal compared to PoS based chains The introduction of political narrative also certainly muddies the water, where some might perceive the attacker as an ally instead. Further fracturing the defense effort... What also stands out is that XMR's security ratio (the ratio between market capitalization & security budget) is actually slightly better when compared to BTC: XMR = $55M (block reward) x 0.51 (attack threshold) = $28M (security budget) / $6B (market capitalization) = 0.5% (security ratio) (yearly) BTC: $19B x 0.51 = $9.7B / 2.2T (0.4%)! For reference & comparison, here is the security budget math for the top 3 PoS chains: ETH: 542B+0.97B+3.33B x 0.29 x 0.33 = $52.2B (10%) SOL: 101B+1.15B+5.26B x 0.68 x 0.33 = $24.1B (23%) ADA: 29B+0.01B+0.7B x 0.60 x 0.51 = 9.1B (31.3%) It is crazy how much better PoS security really is when compared to PoW. ETH, for example, has 5x the security budget of BTC at 1/4th the market capitalization, with a lower inflation rate to boot! Another interesting observation is that XMR actually does have tail inflation... Teaching us that even adding tail inflation to BTC when the crisis inevitably hits might also not be enough by itself to defend from an ongoing "51% attack"! This is all adding to the laundry list of competing interests, responses, factions & incentives at play during a "51% attack" on a PoW chain. We can at least draw the conclusion that when this all finally plays out on BTC that it will be even messier & ever more chaotic than we first thought Bad Enough: This was technically not a "51% attack" as the total stake was much lower, somewhere between 28% too 38% depending on whose numbers you believe. While also not fitting the "attack" part of "51% attack", as they did not steal from or censor anyone. This can be seen as more of a "demonstration" There is conflicting information on the claimed 6-block re-org, as some researcher are reporting that their nodes did not see it. This is also not the type of thing you can look up on a normal explorer, either, as most explorers will only display the "canonical" history. Cyber Capital research was not running a Monero node at that time, either, so I will throw my hands up on this one until more information comes out to clarify this contradiction in evidence However, Qubic was able to get to over 51% of block production over a period of 100 blocks by leveraging "selfish mining" techniques. This is even confirmed by Qubics' critics. That is, as far as I am concerned, bad enough by itself & represents another type of attack. Gaining control without acting on that newfound power does not negate the control... That is why I am mostly uninterested in attempting to minimize the gravity of this event by debating overly nuanced technical details. As that quickly becomes another way for us to stick our heads in the sand Who is Next: The Qubic community has just voted to target Dogecoin next! This same playbook can be applied to chains mined with ASIC's as the majority of the hashrate came from "bribing" pre-existing miners using Qubic token incentives So that means an attack on DOGE & maybe even LTC (merged mining) is potentially on the table for Qubic. We should not expect a public announcement of intent until they are much closer to gaining a majority share, as that is what they did with XMR Ofcourse, this playbook is not limited to Qubic, so we might end up seeing other chains follow their example by taking over other smaller PoW chains Solution: The majority of the XMR community is not going to like my solution: Proof of Stake The writing is on the wall: PoS is objectively more secure, more decentralized, more fair & more economically sound There is no good reason not to embrace this new technological reality: Evolve or die Conclusion: Out of all of the PoW chains, this could have happened too; XMR is the least deserving of being attacked XMR is a staunch community of cypherpunks & privacy advocates. Whose heart, for the most part, is definitely in the right place, as they are actively fighting for all of our freedoms, especially our right to privacy! ❤️ That is why I hope they come out of this stronger; adopting PoS will most certainly achieve that. The greatest expression of anti-fragility is to accept radical change when under extreme pressure; As that is how diamonds are formed! 💎

@evilduck92 There are different suggested proposals, not only this one. See #issuecomment-3207278521" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">github.com/monero-project…

Monero is frustrating. I have a lot of appreciation for what it is and the role it serves, but it's community is so hard to get along with sometimes. There is a thread right now on the Monero subreddit about the possibility of using masternodes to increase security on the network. Having actively followed Dash for almost as long as masternodes have been a thing I have a few thoughts on it, and some knowledge of how they work. I went into the thread and replied mostly with clarifications about how masternodes work or could work for Monero only to find that I'm shadowbanned in that subreddit. reddit.com/r/Monero/comme…

@Ryan_S_Gladwin @c___f___b @DecryptMedia Good that you mention "most likely", but there are more sources and not only shai. There are additional ways to verify and prove that no 51% attack has happened - and that "51% control" (of the hashpower) does not necessarily mean "network takeover" x.com/BawdyAnarchist…

@parasew @c___f___b @DecryptMedia > Shai Wyborski, an independent researcher commissioned by Qubic to research the incident, found that Qubic “most likely” never achieved 51% control over Monero.

Looks like #Qubic has achieved 51% over #Monero, we are waiting for independent confirmations. In the meanwhile #Monero team is polishing details of their 51% attack protection. Many accused us of being sponsored by 3-letter agencies to attack this anon coin. What do you think now, after we has helped Monero to prepare for its future fights against those agencies?..

@SagnikFCB @gnukeith Ladybird, in about two years.

@gnukeith What browsers would you suggest? From personal experience and hopping from one to another I've settled for Brave or Zen atp.

@Ryan_S_Gladwin @c___f___b @DecryptMedia Do you mean this one? decrypt.co/335685/after-a…? You could have made it more clear that there has been no 51% attack. And the $DOGE attack is a joke, not sure why to give Qubic more stagelight at this time.

@parasew @c___f___b @DecryptMedia Have u read my articles?

@Ryan_S_Gladwin @c___f___b @DecryptMedia Did you correct your numbers already? We are still waiting for a correction from "journalists" and "media" that no 51% attack has happened.

@c___f___b Hello, I'm a journalist for @DecryptMedia writing about this story. Please drop me a DM, I want to understand your position better.

Thanks for all the great responses to the article about why there was no 51% attack on #Monero. We are updating the post daily, keep the input coming! Events such as this make $XMR even more resilient see #issuecomment-3207278521" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">github.com/monero-project…

@devilish_flux @DontTraceMeBruh can you explain what you are referring to?

@DontTraceMeBruh is this how monero how monero fights centralization danger? by introducing centralization?