51% attack on Monero prompts proposal to overhaul consensus mechanism

Several solutions have been proposed to bolster Monero’s proof-of-work consensus mechanism to prevent 51% attacks on the network.

The Monero community is exploring a potential overhaul of its proof-of-work (PoW) consensus mechanism to make the network resistant to 51% attacks.

Community members suggested several proposals, including localizing mining hardware, switching to a merge mining algorithm,  allowing XMR to be mined alongside Bitcoin (BTC) or other major cryptocurrencies, and adopting Dash’s ChainLocks solution.

Dash’s ChainLocks uses “randomly selected masternodes” to reach a quorum on the first valid block broadcast by the network, locking the blockchain ledger into place and appending the chain only with blocks verified through the ChainLock system. This would function on top of the existing PoW Consensus.

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