What damage do you think would&#x27;ve happened? I am honestly confused as to why people are so afraid of a fork.<p>If there is a fork, it just means that people have to decide which branch they believe in. They might even get different names. If you have coins on both forks, you can spend both coins.<p>In practice, the total market cap of the two forks should approximate the market cap of the original, which means your coins didn&#x27;t lose any value. And in practice, whichever fork has more mindshare will probably win, not because of any technical reason, but because that&#x27;s the one people are paying attention to so that&#x27;s the one that seems safer to mine on.<p>Heck, if there really were a long-lived fork, people could just require people who want to spend pre-fork coins to send the coins on both forks before they consider the bill &quot;paid&quot;.<p>How bad exactly do you think it could&#x27;ve gotten, in the worst case scenario? To me, the beauty of Bitcoin is that the worst case scenario just isn&#x27;t that bad.