Selfish mining at its finest: Qubic attracts miners because it gives them more profit than a normal pool:
—It converts the mined XMR into USDT.
—It uses part of it to buy back and burn their QUBIC token.
—It provides extra rewards to the miner.
This economic incentive explains why so many joined and why their hash power grew.
Thankfully, there are several proposals to negate this, such as publish or perish and detective mining.
Truthfully, the problem is not the amount of hashrate they have. They have less than 51% and so that's fine. The problem is that they are doing the reorganizations and causing delays and other such problems and these selfish mining defenses will negate their advantage doing so.
You're going to have to walk me thru the economics of this, because what I'm understanding is: earn XMR (+100%? minus mining costs), convert to USD (-2%), convert to Qubic (-2%), burn Qubic (-100%). Where is the profit?
The trick is: Qubic is not just mining Monero and then torching money for fun. They engineered an incentive loop. Here’s the breakdown:
1. Base layer – mine Monero.
Miners contribute CPU cycles, solve RandomX, get XMR block rewards. That’s the same as any other Monero pool.
2. Conversion layer – pool takes custody.
Instead of simply paying out XMR, Qubic converts what was mined into a stable asset (e.g. USDT). Small spreads or fees here, but nothing dramatic.
3. Tokenomics layer – dual split.
Half of the value is used to buy and burn QUBIC tokens on the open market. That creates artificial scarcity → price support for QUBIC.
The other half (plus some fraction of the USDT itself) is paid out to miners. So a miner doesn’t just get “XMR value,” they get XMR-equivalent + upside from the token pump.
4. Where profit appears.
If QUBIC’s price rises because of continuous burns, early miners who also accumulate QUBIC tokens see their holdings appreciate.
Miners effectively extract both the intrinsic Monero value and speculative upside tied to QUBIC’s market cap.
That “extra” makes it more attractive than a plain Monero pool—even if there’s a haircut on conversions.
So: the burn is not destroying miner profit, it’s designed to transfer value into the token economy. The miners get rewarded partly in QUBIC (whose price is buoyed by the burns), making the package richer than XMR alone—as long as people believe QUBIC will hold or rise.
If you’re asking “what if QUBIC dumps?” then the loop collapses: miners would just see less payout than a normal Monero pool. Right now, the growth in hashrate suggests enough miners believe the upside compensates the risk.
