It’s Thanksgiving weekend in Canada and I wanted to share how grateful I am for so much.

In the spirit of friendliness in particular, I’m reaching out to all those companies who have signed on to the NYA and still intend to go ahead with trying activate a hard fork that users and developers did not sign up for.

We can only see just how anti-fragile and unbreakable bitcoin is when it is put to real world tests. The failure of the NYA to take over bitcoin will demonstrate how bitcoin is able to defeat such an attack, and for that I’m grateful that we have a real world test to prove this. (It will prove many critics of bitcoin wrong and increase bitcoin’s known security, appeal and price).

For years, people have wondered if bitcoin could withstand an attack from within. “What if 51% of the mining hash power were used to try to change bitcoin?” they asked. This was such a question that when mining pools first became large, even the largest one encouraged miners to leave it when its share of hash power approached 51%. Today, it is clear that mining is highly centralized way beyond 51% in the hands of very few people. And like all industries there’s a few strong leaders in market share in mining and in wallets. That’s cool.

But what happens if a bunch of those guys get in a room and try to take over bitcoin? Well, as it turns out, first, they have to do a hard fork - not just a hard fork of the blockchain, but of the github code repository. They stop making contributions to the main bitcoin repository at github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin, because that’s community controlled. Instead they copy the whole repository and put it into a fork they control. And they have to break to the consensus rules or they won’t have really taken over anything, so in this case they’ve gone with the seemingly innocuous 2MB block size consensus rule change.

But for them to truly take over it turns out they need to do a lot more than just this. They need to convince the market of users and investors that their new forked coins are worth more than the original coins. Right now, they are pretending that a coin’s value comes from their mining power and their businesses’ market share of whatever their businesses do. But even before the moment of truth of forking, we see how that’s not true. Miners don’t mine the chain that they believe in or claim to be committed to. They mine the chain that is most profitable to mine on. The last hard fork has proved this in spades. And businesses won’t turn away business from the original chain. We already see Erik Voorhees, one of the most vocal and committed NYAers, saying on twitter that his business will still support the original chain.

In short, the original chain will have more valuable coins, which will mean that miners will continue to mine it and businesses will continue to deal in it and the NYA will be just another altcoin launch (with an airdrop to bitcoin holders).

For demonstrating bitcoin’s ability to shrug off such an attack I am truly grateful to the NYA businesses.