...
Incorrect. The point is that no matter what proof-of-work algorithm an altcoin employs, those who are protecting Bitcoin will rent enough mining hash rate to fuck your coin forever. They only have to rent it for a short period of time, and your difficulty will be so high that it will never produce a block again. And all the money in the chain will be unspendable for a very, very, very long time.
The "attacker" has the resources to do that to any proof-of-work altcoin which doesn't have the level of hashrate of Bitcoin.
Of course the altcoin can then manually reset the difficulty lower using a fork, but then the attacker can repeat again. It will quickly become clear that the altcoin is fucked.
If Monero starts to approach $1 billion market cap (or perhaps much less if the liquidity is very high, which it is for Monero), this attacker will destroy Monero and profit by shorting.
This doesn't mean I am attacking Monero. I am just speaking factually.
If the proof of work algorithms are different there is nothing new here. Manipulating the difficulty in the manner suggested in the article is a horribly inefficient way to attack a POW coin, if the objective is to create havoc in the coin, since it requires much more hashpower than a simple 51% attack. The simple economics of this is that the greater the market price of a coin, the more costly such a brute force attack would be and consequently the least the chance of such an attack. There is really nothing new here. As for bear raids again the more liquid an asset is the less likely a bear raid will succeed.
If the proof of work algorithms are the same then there can be little or no cost in the ASIC case I mentioned above, because the equipment is surplus and obsolete and there is no other use for it. This is why we have seen this phenomenon in some small SHA 256 coins not because the coins were specifically targeted for an attack but rather because people were trying to extract additional value out of obsolete ASIC Bitcoin mining equipment.
Edit 1: Many in the early days of Bitcoin were afraid that some large bank would attempt such an attack on Bitcoin in order to "nip the competition in the bud", it did not happen. My take is this did not happen because the large players rarely take much notice of the small players until it is too late. If Monero were to grow large enough to pose a serious threat to Bitcoin, and that will take way more than a 1 billion USD market cap, then it will be also way more difficult to attack.
Edit 2: The DAO and MTGox were attacked because there were very weak and full of vulnerabilities. Ethereum could easily go down with the DAO, because the Ethereum devs panicked under pressure and are inducing the community to panic. They should simple do nothing and let the DAO fail rather put the entire credibility of Ethereum at risk. Bitcoin did not fork over the MTGox troubles and that is why Bitcoin is still around. As for Monero it could not fork to pull these kinds of shenanigans even it it wanted to, because
one would not know which transactions to censor.