It's distributed so it's probably hard to kill. Unless your the NSA or CIA and have tons of computing power with which you can just flood the market with rendering everyone else's bitcoins useless...
Seriously though, it seems like Bitcoin is really vulnerable to this sort of attack, no matter what "hardening" features are builtin to make mining harder. NSA can spend a week and kill it all off. Is there a way to block whole hash blocks that the NSA or someone else who might have a large chunk of the bitcoin market?
Still I wouldn't write it off so quick, it's the branding/legitimacy question along with traction among merchants and usd<->bitcoin that's holding it back right now.
Seriously though, it seems like Bitcoin is really vulnerable to this sort of attack, no matter what "hardening" features are builtin to make mining harder. NSA can spend a week and kill it all off. Is there a way to block whole hash blocks that the NSA or someone else who might have a large chunk of the bitcoin market?
Still I wouldn't write it off so quick, it's the branding/legitimacy question along with traction among merchants and usd<->bitcoin that's holding it back right now.