>Hand wavy nonsense. Exchanges have failed before and bitcoin is still going strong. The stakes are different this time. >There already was a hard fork, and t

>Hand wavy nonsense. Exchanges have failed before and bitcoin is still going strong. The stakes are different this time. >There already was a hard fork, and the network did split, yet bitcoin is still going strong. The previous party line is "Hard fork bad, soft fork good". Anyway, we can agree that now everyone is free to start their own fork and it's a good thing for bitcoin^TM. >The bitcoin difficulty rises and falls with the ability to mine it. If the number of miners go down, the network remains unaffected. What's your point here? The network recalculates difficulty every 2016 blocks. Assuming regular 10 minute intervals it is updated approximately every 14 days. If the BTC network was to split evenly in the 2X hard fork, then in the worst case it will take 28 days before an adjustment is due. If the split is not 50/50, then the minority chain will need proportionally more time. In the meantime both chains will be congested due to longer average block interval. That said, both chains will need several months to stabilise as miners move between forks to maximise their profit, as we have already seen with the BCC/BCH split, and that was initiated by a <5% pool. tl;dr A chain split will make the network unusable for weeks if not months.