[loxs]

Having the power to deny others to mine blocks does not mean that you can obtain the tokens from their wallets. Miners can't sign transactions on users' behalf. You can rewrite all of history but then no exchange will accept your version of it to let you exchange the tokens for fiat. Also this will almost certainly crash the price of XMR substantially. And later people will be able to fork/restore the original version. The technological side of the blockchain is only part of the consensus/trust/market/popularity. People are the other part, and people will not pay the attacker for their successful attack.

[MadnessASAP]

The attacker doesn't need to steal tokens. They just need to short the token while they sufficiently disrupt the network to drive down the price. They get the money and your tokens become worthless.

[subsistence234]

I was completely wrong about the cost. XMR mining rewards amount to only $150k/day.

At the height of the attack, Qubic (the company) paid people up to $3 in QUBIC for every $1 of XMR they mined through QUBIC, and they achieved around 33% of XMR's hashrate which was sufficient to mine the majority of blocks for a few hours.

If they were forced to buy back all those QUBICs they paid out, this might have cost them ~$100k/day. But thanks to the media attention it's likely that they didn't need to buy anything back and actually were able to emit more than they otherwise could have.

XMR needs to adapt -- switch to PoS, or ASICs-based POW, or a hybrid of both.

[subsistence234]

Controlling 51% of XMR costs ~$30M per day, you'd have to short a huge amount of XMR to make that worthwhile. Who would be the counter party and how would you do that anonymously?

The attack itself is unprofitable, the "profit" for Qubic is the publicity they get. (or at least that's what they're betting on)