By simply being taken over by a bank group. And this is not a hypothesis to be ruled out from the outset. The largest banking groups have ample means to raid everything and sink the money forever. The market cap does not weigh heavily on traditional finance
Uhhm. That would totally be stupid to be honest. Bitcoins are extremely expensive now that they cannot pour that much money to kill it off. Imagine, right now if they want to destroy say 1,000,000 (1mln) bitcoins that would cost them 8,000,000,000 (8 bln) dollars to do it. And that is assuming the prices will not go up if they buy that much on one go. That is a lot of money and for sure the banks will not waste it by burning just 1 mln bitcoins. I would assume they would need to at least buy 90% of all bitcoins to totally kill it off, but that means they need to buy 19 mln bitcoins. 19 x 8 bln dollars = 152 bln dollars, do you think even if they had that much money, they would waste it on just killing it?