Bitcoin, Monero, Nano: Who Could Win?
The Nakamoto coefficient measures how many entities it would take to seize a network. Here's how Bitcoin, Monero, and Nano actually stack up.
“Decentralized” is the most overused word in crypto, and also the easiest to fake. A network can have ten thousand nodes and still be controlled by three people if those three people happen to hold the majority of its mining power or its voting weight. The metric that cuts through the marketing is the Nakamoto coefficient: the minimum number of independent entities that would need to collude to seize control of a network’s consensus. Coined in 2017 by Balaji Srinivasan and Leland Lee, it answers one blunt question: how many phone calls would it take to compromise this chain? Let’s run that question against Bitcoin, Monero, and Nano.
The Threshold Changes Depending on the Design
For proof-of-work chains like Bitcoin and Monero, the danger line is the classic 51% attack: whoever controls more than half the network’s hashing power can rewrite recent blocks, reverse their own transactions, and censor everyone else’s. For Nano, which uses Open Representative Voting instead of mining, the threshold is different: a Nano node won’t consider a transaction confirmed until it sees more than 67% of online voting weight agree, not 51%. That’s a higher bar than a simple majority, though it is measured against online weight, and an attacker holding just over a third of it could stall confirmations. Either way the underlying question (how concentrated is that weight?) is the same one the Nakamoto coefficient is built to answer.
Bitcoin: Low Coefficient, High Cost
Bitcoin’s Nakamoto coefficient by mining pool concentration is famously small, commonly cited between 3 and 5. As of early October 2026, two pools alone, Foundry USA and AntPool, controlled roughly 47% of Bitcoin’s hashrate between them; a third pool joining would clear the 51% threshold. On paper, that’s a thin number for the largest, most valuable network in crypto.
In practice, Bitcoin has only brushed up against this once. In June 2014, the mining pool GHash.io briefly touched around 55% of network hashrate. The community reacted immediately: public pressure, and a wave of miners voluntarily leaving the pool, pushed GHash.io back below 40% within days, and it later split itself up entirely. No attack was ever actually executed. That episode is the closest Bitcoin has ever come, and it was resolved socially rather than technically, which is itself a data point: Bitcoin’s mining hardware and hashrate can be redirected by individual miners fast enough that pool concentration, while real, has never translated into a sustained takeover. The bigger practical shield is economics: attacking a network worth well over a trillion dollars would require an almost unthinkable capital outlay in mining hardware and energy, most of which would lose value the moment the attack tanked the price of the asset being attacked.
Monero: This One Actually Happened
This is the one where the danger stopped being theoretical. In mid-2025, a project called Qubic began redirecting rented and pooled computing power at Monero, using an incentive scheme that converted mined XMR into rewards for its own token. Qubic’s share of Monero’s hashrate climbed from under 2% in May to over 25% by late July, and by August 12, 2025, Qubic publicly claimed to have crossed 51% of Monero’s total hashrate. Independent researchers disputed the exact percentage (some analyses put Qubic’s real peak share closer to 28-40% rather than a sustained majority), but what’s not in dispute is that Monero suffered real chain reorganizations during this period, including a six-block reorg in August and an 18-block reorg in mid-September that, by most accounts, invalidated more than a hundred confirmed transactions, though Qubic’s founder disputed that. Ledger’s CTO publicly stated Monero appeared to be in the midst of a live 51% attack; XMR’s price dropped double digits over the following week.
Why was Monero the one this happened to? Monero deliberately uses RandomX, a CPU-friendly mining algorithm designed to resist ASIC centralization and keep mining accessible to ordinary hardware. That egalitarian design has a side effect: it also makes Monero’s hashrate unusually easy to rent, redirect, or temporarily outbid, because the same general-purpose compute that mines Monero today can be pointed at Monero from a completely different project tomorrow, the way Qubic did. The Monero community’s response has leaned into decentralized mining pools like P2Pool to reduce reliance on any single pool operator, but the core lesson stands: Monero is the one of these three coins that has already experienced a documented, if disputed, majority-hashrate event in the real world, not a hypothetical one.
Nano: A Different Kind of Number
Nano doesn’t have miners to concentrate, so the comparison has to be made on voting weight instead of hashrate. Nano’s own materials cite a Nakamoto coefficient of 11 against Bitcoin’s 4, a figure worth treating as self-reported rather than independently audited, but directionally consistent with how ORV is structured. More importantly, the quorum Nano requires is 67%, not 51%, meaning an attacker needs to control a meaningfully larger share of online weight to force confirmations, though a little over a third would be enough to stall them. And because delegation carries no lock-up or slashing risk (a holder can redelegate their voting weight away from a misbehaving representative instantly, without losing custody of their funds for even a moment), any representative that started acting maliciously would likely see its voting weight evaporate in real time, long before an attack could be sustained. That’s a fundamentally different dynamic than Bitcoin or Monero’s mining pools, where hashrate can take longer to physically redirect.
The tradeoff is that Nano’s total value secured is far smaller than Bitcoin’s or Monero’s, so the economic cost of acquiring 67% of its voting weight is a very different calculation than renting hashrate against a trillion-dollar network, smaller in absolute dollar terms, even if the percentage bar is higher.
So, Is Any of the Three in Danger Right Now?
Bitcoin: no credible present danger. Its coefficient is mathematically low, but its economic scale makes a real attack self-defeating, and its one real-world brush with concentration in 2014 resolved itself socially within days.
Monero: this is the one to watch. It already lived through a real, documented hashrate-concentration event in 2025 that produced actual chain reorgs, not just a hypothetical warning. The network survived without a confirmed double-spend, but the episode proved the attack surface is real, not theoretical, and it’s a direct consequence of Monero’s ASIC-resistant mining design being easy to rent.
Nano: no attempt to seize its voting weight has ever been made or credibly threatened, though a week-long spam flood in March 2021 knocked nodes out of sync and nearly halted the network. The 67% quorum plus instant, costless redelegation would make a takeover considerably harder to sustain than a mining-pool takeover, but that resilience is easier to claim than to stress-test, since Nano has never faced a real-world takeover attempt the way Monero has.
None of these three is “unsafe” in any everyday sense. But if you’re ranking them purely on which has demonstrated real vulnerability under real market pressure, Monero is the only one of the three that’s already been tested, and the result of that test is exactly why the Nakamoto coefficient matters more than marketing copy.
The Crypto Highlander