in fact, it was my first thought that perhaps a bank was behind the hack. why would an individual take the time and effort to squash the price to zero? why wouldn't he just steal the bitcoin from an unlimited withdrawal acct before anyone would notice?
no, the intent of the hack was to drive the price down and destroy confidence.
Agreed. Named + verified sources or not - some things are just too obvious. Why would any hacker try to destroy Bitcoin? Why would any criminal try to destroy Bitcoin? Why would any greedy person try to destroy Bitcoin (except for: when they know they can make more money if Bitcoin wasn't there)? Driving the Bitcoin price to $0.01 only makes sense for one very specific rationale: Destroy the market, destroy trust in Bitcoin. So far, it seemingly wasn't too successful.
The really bad news: Given the markets are open to everyone - what keeps them from gradually buying up significant amounts of Bitcoins so they can "play" with the markets whenever they want to? Early adopters owning a significant part of the available Bitcoins could be trouble in theory - but given that they are early adopters and most likely in it because they like Bitcoin and believe in Bitcoin, it's unlikely that this would be a real problem. Banks buying up significant parts, however, would certainly be a severe problem. And at the moment, I can't think of anything that would keep them from doing that. If I was a bank, it would be what I would be doing.
So, everyone: Buy Bitcoin so the banks can't. And don't sell (buy stuff or ... um ... donate to me instead ;-) ) ... we just need to outnumber them in due time!