@Jeff Booth just did more digging after my initial post. While they could theoretically create agents to run nodes and attempt to hijack the protocol, they still would have to over run the miners. Too expensive to do. The agents could cause a great deal of chaos , but it would be short lived. More than likely if you measure in fiat money the price for sure would drop during that time. But overall as a monetary and freedom protocol, no damage would be done!

Think this is actually a good observation to think through risks but unlikely imo. For that, agents would need physical resources and determine that a controlled bitcoin - which would then likely fail…..is better for them. Zero sum thinking from a zero sum game. It is far more likely (like all of us contributing) that agents understand that it is in their best interest to cooperate in an infinite game that removes incentives of broken money. The more real risk (not for bitcoin but for some in bitcoin today) is through social attack engineering a risk to change adapt the protocol that then introduces a fork that has some people on wrong side of it (US $ coin, quantum resistant coin, it’s a database instead of money coin)

If a bad actor was able to hard fork, what would be the incentives for the rest of us to participate in that new network? Correct me where I’m wrong, but doesn’t the original iteration of the network continue unchanged?