There does need to be a clearer distinction between an opinion and a news article though.
I fully agree.
CoinDesk has funding and currently runs no advertising, and receives no money to write articles.
Interesting. What kind of information source do you have for this? Do you have an explanation why they on one side seem to have good to outstanding knowledge of the matter, but on the other side they write articles saying more or less the opposite of what are known facts?
After reading the other posts in this thread, your claim is not convincing without supporting references or naming the source.
Any advertorial content would need to be labelled as such with nofollow links anyway, otherwise it is against Google guidelines.
Google guidelines are not a law. They don't need to follow this. There would be no consequences for them as long as they pretend they do not receive payment. Hence this is not an argument.