This is a though I had a few days ago.
There are stakeholders of our current financial systems who would like to secure their wealth. If these stakeholders sense bitcoin as a threat to their wealth, they would want to stop it. In this case they would want to stop it with a >50% attack.
I have read the Bitcoin Papers and found the following:
The incentive may help encourage nodes to stay honest. If a greedy attacker is able to assemble more CPU power than all the honest nodes, he would have to choose between using it to defraud people by stealing back his payments, or using it to generate new coins. He ought to find it more profitable to play by the rules, such rules that favour him with more new coins than everyone else combined, than to undermine the system and the validity of his own wealth.
Since the current financial systems won't get undermined, a >50% attack still makes sense from their point of view.
- How big are the efforts to induce a >51% attack? (DDoS / hack Pools + provide own hashing power)
- Could the crashed BlockChain get recovered? (after implementing attack prevention code)