Apology: I did not read the whole thread before replying. But I agree it needs explanation.


1) There will be no official announcement, because there is no authority for Bitcoin.

2) Nothing mayor has happened, your Bitcoins has been and are safe. All transactions already have been reprocessed on new fork. In fact the very first few blocks on new branch should contain all transactions in old branch. The main difference is who will get fees for these transactions and 25BTC mining profit. Otherwise the whole event has no impact. The threat of double spending is theoretical, because when fork occurred there were miners working on both branches.

3) The ramifications are and will be purely psychological. The main one is loss of confidence in the brand name. This may cause lowering of exchange rates and this in turn may trigger stop loss orders. The end result is panic on exchanges. We have seen something like this over year ago and Bitcoin is still kicking.