The recent sharp increase in MineXMR’s mining hash rate has led some XMR enthusiasts to suspect ulterior motives.
On Tuesday, the hash rate of the Monero (XMR) mining pool MineXMR surpassed 1.4 GH/s, accounting for 44 percent of the XMR network’s hash rate. MineXMR has approximately 13,000 miners and charges a 1% pool fee. According to a screenshot from Archive.org, the pool only contributed 34% of the XMR network’s hash rate in August.
The rapid increase in network hash rate has alarmed some XMR enthusiasts, with Reddit user u/vscmm writing: ” “We need to talk to MineXMR right now in order to take action! Please send an email to MineXMR admins at support@minexmr.com to request action; a 51 percent pool is not in the best interests of the community or t “”The pool.”
In the event of a 51 percent attack, the bad actors could potentially overturn network transactions in order to double-spend participants’ crypto. However, because Monero conceals the sender and recipient’s identities through stealth addresses and ring signatures, hackers’ capabilities in this case would be far more limited. In theory, such attacks could only be used to mine empty blocks or to double-spend their own XMR by selling it to an exchange and then publishing an alternative ledger.
Users on Reddit pointed out that MineXMR publicly discloses the location of its corporate offices, which are in the United Kingdom. Conducting 51 percent-related denial of service and fraud attacks would almost certainly result in criminal charges in that country. Even if a mining pool accumulated more than 51% of a network’s hash rate, this would only jeopardize a blockchain’s operations if the entity had ulterior motives.
Disclaimer: These are the writer’s opinions and should not be considered investment advice. Readers should do their own research.
