Well, the "news article" clearly gets several things wrong and the author doesn't understand how bitcoin (or the "attack" described in the paper) works.
Not sure about the "paper" yet. Still need to review it, but (based on a limited understanding from what the "news article" tried to say) I suspect that is isn't a serious threat to most mining pools, and probably isn't a threat to bitcoin at all.
I'm glad to hear that the news article is confused and not me, lol.
I kind of got stuck between an article which didn't make a lot of sense and a whitepaper that's too technical for me.
The paper seems reasonable. I'll have to consider it some more, but the key information to be aware of (if you don't operate your own mining pool) is:
the plausible outcome of a successful attack is a change in the pool mining model (e.g., shift towards solo mining or private pools).
In other words, this is not an attack on bitcoin mining or bitcoin itself. It's an attack on pool operators. If someone found a way to pull off the attack successfully, blocks would still occur every 10 minutes on average and bitcoin transactions would still work. Pool operators would find that they are paying the participants, but are generating less (or no) revenue for the pool. Eventually the pool would have to shut down and participants would need to find a new pool to participate in. If the attacker attacked ALL pools, then pool mining would need to abandon the Pay-Per-Share concept (or there would be a shift away from public pools).
This is mostly a theoretical attack. Implementing it in a way that would have a significant effect on a pool would require some significant logistical hurdles.
