It’s fork day. The current block number is 494783. You’ve been waiting for this for the past six months. All the Reddit drama, Twitter debates, Slack arguments and community angst has been leading up to this one moment. You wait patiently for the fork block. You have your popcorn ready. The stage is set for the final defeat of the evil 2X corporate takeover. You’ve convinced yourself already what’s going to happen: the market will price BTC higher than B2X, and miners will quickly switch back to mining the original chain.

However… you were wrong. The unthinkable happens. A black swan. The miners are mining B2X, and for some reason.. the market begins valuing B2X higher than BTC. What’s going on? This shouldn’t be happening. The original chain begins dying a painful death, transactions accumulate quickly, and fees become outrageous. It starts to look like 2X has won. You sit there, like a Hillary Clinton supporter on election night wondering how this could have happened.

If such a thing were to occur, it would no doubt be rationalized by hindsight as all black swan events are. How could it not turn out this way? They always had the support of the miners and major Bitcoin businesses right? It was impossible to think we could overcome that? People will slowly begin to accept what has happened. Things like ‘The market has decided”, “This is how consensus is achieved in Bitcoin” and “Community needs to come together and move on” will start being said.

It’s at this stage that the true test will begin. The Bitcoin community will need to come together and show its resilience. If the unthinkable happens and 2X wins, it doesn’t mean Bitcoin has been “changed”, it means Bitcoin has been temporarily destroyed, and we need to get to work to collectively recreate it. We won’t surrender and we won’t compromise. A new hard fork will be released with a new PoW algorithm and we’ll carry on as normal.

Those that urge we accept the verdict of the market are missing the entire point of Bitcoin. Bitcoin is about individual financial sovereignty; we don’t let any external entity such as the market, miners, central bank or government define for us what is and isn’t a Bitcoin. If we don’t like the 2X abomination, we can reject it and route around it. We aren’t forced to surrender.

The market and exchanges should be prepared to support three different forks of Bitcoin this November. The original chain, the 2X chain, and the new Bitcoin chain with a better PoW. As soon as the new PoW hard fork binaries are released on Bitcoin.org, I intend to fully commit to supporting that chain and calling it “Bitcoin”, even if hash rate returns to the original chain at a later date.