So you call yourself a "Free Market Capitalist" but you are afraid of a free market? Wow, I'm impressed.
FYI, hard forks have occurred in the past.
FYI, the only way both forks would continue on is if a subset of miners kept mining each fork.
FYI, if that happened (it wouldn't), you would still control the same amount of "money" with the same private keys, it would just be divided across two chains.
That is what I was thinking would happen. If the chains would split, you would generally have the one half of the original amount on each of the two halves which would equal what you originally started out with.
Minus the shock from the panic.
Just like with stock splits, there almost always goes down some.
Most people on bitcoinocracy have voted that they will sell their coins in hardfork, which means that we could see big drop in price.