I have been thinking about this article a few times in the past days, still mostly spitballin’ here.

While I do agree that the PoW mechanism might seem like a waste to financial institutions, I don’t think that they’d be able to achieve consensus on undermining it. Especially if they are located in different countries, some may assign a higher value to a system that is not dominated by US companies. Too many cooks spoil the broth—just like we have seen R3, Hyperledger, Libra etc. silt up as they on-boarded too many different players, the more companies (especially internationally) get a slice of the Bitcoin IOU market, the less likely this scenario seems to me. If it’s just a few companies in the US, I could see them make an alliance to destroy PoW, and it might only fall apart when they succeed and have to try to make their own thing work afterwards.

Either way, this scenario seems to be hinged on a number of players with diverse interests to band together to undermine Bitcoin, just like with the frequent "what if all countries outlawed Bitcoin at once". For either scenario, it would be helpful if there are already a few different players that are invested that don’t have much to gain by going along. Just like with the various interests among users now, the steadfast minority would then be able to resist a change to the system.