They have tried, they have all failed. Bitcoin is international. A 51% attack is so implausibly expensive that nobody really has the resources to pull it off. People will see it coming a mile away. And it gets more expensive every year. If you had that much money to put into destroying Bitcoin, it would be much better spent on an ad campaign telling people Bitcoin was bad than doing a 51% attack. A 51% attack doesn’t prove Bitcoin is broken, it proves the protocol is working exactly as expected.

Bitcoin’s value to society is the ability to easily transfer money from point A to B and having a clear fiscal policy it has kept to for 15 years, 365 days a year, 24/7 without a single hour of downtime, a bank holiday, or getting hacked. There’s a reason big money like hedge funds and private banking are investing in it: it’s actually useful and has massive potential. The market cap of Bitcoin is 850 BILLION USD, that’s bigger than the GDP of Sweden or Israel or Vietnam.

Transactions on Bitcoin lightning occur in under a second and cost pennies in fees. Remittance services and bank wires use just as much energy and waste not just energy but human capital as well, we no longer need humans manually sending bank wires like it’s 1910. You just don’t see headlines about the energy impact of bank wires or western union because it’s not novel, we just accept it as a cost of our financial system.