I know nothing about IntenseCoin internals. What I was able to learn from the article is this:
1) somebody gained significant hashing power and at the same time he exploited some weakness in IntenseCoin to find 6000 blocks himself.
2) IntenseCoin developers decided that this is bad and they made a hard fork, causing A LOT of troubles.
I believe that there are two problems. First one is the exploitable weakness, and second trouble is mad developers making hard fork as a solution for this problem.
If the very same problem happened with VoteCoin, 6000 blocks would be worth 750K VOT coins, which the "attacker" could actually sell at TradeSatoshi exchange to get 1.33 BTC.
The price of VOT would drop down to 100 sat. But that's the worst case scenario. Nobody gets hurt. All coins held by all users would be safe. There would be no need for any hard forking in my opinion.
VoteCoin uses a dificulty adjustment algorithm based on DigiShield v3/v4 [DigiByte-PoW], with simplifications and altered parameters, to adjust difficulty to target the desired 2.5-minute block time. Unlike Bitcoin, the difficulty adjustment occurs after every block. So I would say that VoteCoin does not have such weakness as like IntenseCoin and it would prevent such situation anyway.
There is no need to fear the upcoming ASIC release...
-Tom
"The Zcash Foundation has announced that it will make maintaining ASIC resistance an immediate technical priority in response to Chinese mining hardware manufacturer Bitmains claim that is has developed an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) miner that is compatible with the Equihash mining algorithm."
BTCZ, Snowgem, Bitcoin Gold, Bitcoin Private, possibly Hush, Zencash want to change algorithm.