> [The chainsplit] was ultimately resolved with hashpower

Did you read the article? Humans were needed to avoid catastrophe. Here let me post the relevant bit:

quote:

What would have happened if the developers had done nothing?
Throughout the text I’ve emphasized that the downgrade option was the correct one and that speed of developer response was of the essence. Let’s examine this claim further by thinking about what would have happened if the developers had simply let things take their course. Vitalik Buterin thinks everything would have been just fine: “if the developers had done nothing, then Bitcoin would have carried on nonetheless, only causing inconvenience to those bitcoind and BitcoinQt users who were on 0.7 and would have had to upgrade.”

Obviously, I disagree. We can’t know for sure what would have happened, but we can make informed guesses. First of all, the fork would have gone on for far longer — essentially until every last miner running version 0.7 or lower either shut down or upgraded their software. Given that many miners leave their setups unattended and others have custom setups that aren’t easy to upgrade quickly, the fork would have lasted days. This would have several effects. Most obviously, the psychological impact of an ongoing fork would have been serious. In contrast, as events actually turned out, the event happened overnight in the US and had been resolved the next morning, and media coverage praised the developers for their effective action. The price of Bitcoin dropped by 25% during the incident but recovered immediately to almost its previous value.

Another adverse impact is that exchanges or payment services that took too long to upgrade their clients (or disable transactions) might find themselves victims of large double-spend attacks. As it happened, OKPay suffered a $10,000 double spend. This was done by a user trying to prove a point and who revealed the details publicly; they got lucky in that their payment to OKPay was confirmed by the 0.8 branch but not 0.7. A longer-running fork would likely have exacerbated the problem and allowed malicious attackers to figure out a systematic way to create double-spend transactions. [1]
Worse, it is possible, even if not likely, that the 0.7 branch might have continued indefinitely. Obviously, if this did happen, it would be devastating for Bitcoin, resulting in a fork of the currency itself. One reason the fork might keep going is because of a “Goldfinger attacker” interested in de-stabilizing Bitcoin: they might not have the resources to execute a 51% attack, but the fork might give them just the opportunity they need: they could simply invest resources into keeping the 0.7 fork alive instead of launching an attack from scratch.

There’s another reason why the fork might have never ended. Miners who postponed their decision to switch from 0.7 to 0.8 by, say, a week would face the distasteful prospect of forgoing a week’s worth of mining revenue. They might instead gamble and continue to operate on the 0.7 branch as a big fish in a small pond. If the 0.7 branch had, say, 10% of the mining power of the 0.8 branch, the miner’s revenue would be multiplied tenfold by mining on the 0.7 branch. Of course, the currency they’d earn would be “Bitcoin v0.7”, which would fork into a different currency from “Bitcoin v0.8”, and would be worth much less, the latter being considered the legitimate Bitcoin. We analyze this type of situation in Chapter 7, “Community, Politics, and Regulation” of our Bitcoin textbook-in-progress or the corresponding sections of the video lecture.

While the exact course of events that would have resulted from inaction is debatable, it is clear that the downgrade solution is by far the less risky one, and the speed and clearheadedness of the developers’ response is commendable.