There is probably no business case for such an operation. To benefit from an extreme price crash you either have to short bitcoin or buy a ton of stuff with it.

There is probably no business case for such an operation. To benefit from an extreme price crash you either have to short bitcoin or buy a ton of stuff with it. In the latter case it is hard to imagine a merchant honoring such orders if he is not convinced the blockchain is sound. As for shorting bitcoin... It's certainly not impossible. But shorting a few Million of Dollars of Bitcoin? If this is done in any kind of trading account (without the money being physically in the hand of the attacker), the trading institution would probably be out of business because of the price drop anyway, before paying the profits to the attacker... For everyone else... You shouldn't have more than 20 BTC on hand anyway. Preferably a lot less, depending on the rest of your portfolio. In these cases any price drop isn't going to wipe you out and the network resumes normal operation.