If BitFury resolved a single doublespend transaction differently from the "main" blockchain, people would(/should) realize that it now has the power to cancel transactions, and stop trusting bitcoin ASAP. At that point you can no longer trust the blockchain, since you can no longer know you're looking at the "true" blockchain, and not a fake one that has been presented to you to make you do something (e.g. pay someone real money).

In any reasonable person's version of "wait X blocks for confirmation" (currently mostly 3), X would be infinite.

>Parent's point is that if BitFury did that, then nobody would trust Bitcoin anymore, thus crashing the price.

If they make good money from it, why would BitFury care about bitcoin's long-term outlook?

Observation is that pretty much nothing crashes the price of Bitcoin.

* During the transaction spam DDOS attacks, the price went up even though it was literally unusable.

* The present price seems sustained by something that looks very Willybotish running between OKCoin and Huobi. https://www.reddit.com/r/Buttcoin/comments/3vnjgk/what_drive...

The remaining American Bitcoin traders are certainly gullible enough to keep buying and trading a 51%-compromised coin. (I mean, there are people who still think Paycoin could make a comeback.) But American traders are a sideshow - all the action is in China (miners, actual traders). So the question would be: will Chinese speculators keep gambling on a 51%-compromised coin?

(And of course the MMM ponzi buyers, whose judgement is sufficiently bad that they wouldn't even understand the problem.)

maybe people will trust bitcoin more if you put the right spin on it (bitcoin is now regulator-approved, etc.).