I cant believe maxwell has the audacity to call a miner optimization an attack. Thats what ASIC manufacturers have been doing all along, optimizing miners.
It's not an optimization though. It's an exploit to gain advantage with no positive benefit to the network. It's not like designing a more power efficient chip or getting cheaper power because those things retain the way they mine blocks. This is using an exploit in the code secretly to gain monetary advantage....
Isnt optimization about efficiency and monetary advantage? If you had an ASIC manufacturing firm and you discovered a way to create chips which give your miner a monetary advantage would you not pursue it?