Monero (XMR) developers and pool operators are weighing a swift, software-level response to last week’s hashrate shock after the Qubic mining pool claimed it had briefly dominated the network and triggered a six-block reorganization. Former Monero lead maintainer Riccardo Spagni proposed deploying “detective mining,” a pool-side strategy he says can neutralize selfish-mining attacks without a hard fork. “A proposal to make Monero completely resilient to selfish-mining attacks, no protocol changes needed,” Spagni wrote, linking to a new Monero Research Lab issue that outlines the approach.
The economics are the point. Spagni’s summary of the underlying Lee–Kim model (2019) claims that if roughly half of network hashrate (i.e., the largest pools) adopt detective mining, the selfish miner’s break-even threshold jumps into the ~32–42% range depending on tie-breaking assumptions—eroding the attack’s profitability and, with wider adoption, wiping it out across tested splits. That is a materially higher hurdle than the classical Eyal–Sirer result, under which selfish mining can be profitable around one-quarter to one-third of hashrate.
Spagni’s issue also anticipates adversarial counter-moves. It recommends quorum-based detection from multiple sensors, short “grace windows” before diverting hashrate, and share-submission checks to defeat decoy jobs—all with rate limits and telemetry to tune false-positive risk. These are pragmatic pool-operator playbooks rather than protocol-level rules, aligning with Monero’s preference to harden incentives and operations before touching consensus.
For Monero, the next steps will be social as much as technical: major pools would need to ship and enable detective-mining logic for the defense to bite at the modeled thresholds. As of Aug. 19, the idea is a public proposal under active discussion rather than an adopted standard. But after a week in which a single pool’s campaign produced a measurable reorg and exchange-level mitigations, the path of least friction—pool software updates that raise the cost of selfish mining—has quickly become the center of gravity for the project’s short-term response.
At press time, XMR traded at $268.
