well lemme see here.
1.) i think the first thing i'd do, if i wanted to destroy Bitcoin (now who would want to do such a thing?), would be to buy a bunch of them. i would buy those Bitcoin at times calculated to drive the market up fairly quickly. i might play a little bit with creating noticeable patterns in the markets, for cover.
all i'd need for that would be some money. it's a thin market - i wouldn't need that much, if i were one of the players who is spooked by the idea of Bitcoin.
2.) i would invest in massive amounts of mining hardware, and bring it into the network gradually. why? follow along...
3.) then i would avail myself of some blogging software (which i have posted about elsewhere - "online personna management" software, here:
http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=13344.0 ). i would create many new personnas here, and on other forums that have impact on Bitcoin. i would not neglect various open news forums like yahoo, etc. i would begin to snipe at Bitcoin wherever a mention of it appeared.
i would create
polarization.
4.) i would enlist the aid of various political and news figures to begin a campaign against Bitcoin. that's certainly a well-established infrastructure...
5.) after that - and in concert with my turning up the volume on the blogging personnas i was using to disparage Bitcoin - i would start a sell-off calculated to drive the price down massively. by then i would have enough Bitcoin, acquired slowly so as to appear as in keeping with the rapid rise of the currency.
6.) as soon as it appeared confidence in Bitcoin was permanently eroding, i would begin to pull all the hashing power off the network - "oh no!" people (and especially my blogging surrogates) would say: "it's the end! all the miners are leaving, and the network will be insecure!"
7.) at that point i would wait for a perfect moment, and execute an attack on the network to fork, or in some way harm, the blockchain - putting back all the hashing power i'd pulled off, and adding a ton more i'd had held in reserve.
i think that's called strategy.
and it might be what's happening now.
just a thought...