And if crypto was such a big threat to pre-exisiting financial houses, then they could:
A) Easily sabotage it, perhaps by taking a large stake and then engineering negative market trends into play.
B) Do the above and end up sitting on a whole big pile of Bitcoin and colluding between themselves to make Bitcoin as unstable and volatile as possible, and profit whilst doing so.
If the big banks could collude to rig the LIBOR rates, they can most certainly collude to rig Bitcoin.
so how would they get a large stake? they could place a 100k BTC buy order on stamp. that would be terrible!
more plausibly, maybe they could steal 700k coins from gox. but why would you risk your stash failing to destroy a currency that you would most benefit from if it were successful? Incentive is written in the protocol, and it works outside the protocol too. decentralised cryptos currencies are here to stay, the big players know this. they also know that if they somehow manage to destroy bitcoin (HOW??) a new one will take over and their efforts will be in vein. the more bitcoins that governments and banks own, the more promising the future for bitcoin will be. sad but true.
- but seriously, imagine you are a bank, and you own 700k bitcoins. thats something like 10% of all the coins currently. you have the power to make it succeed. Being the first crypto, and the most popular crypto, you have a high probability of succeeding. do you A; make it succeed and own 10% of the global share (nobody comes close with fiat!) while back stabbing all your competitiors, or B; do you try and destroy it, costing you millions and giving away an opportunity to somebody else.