[pdpi]

> Here's another stupid question: Can anybody start a new fork?

Not a stupid question at all. The answer is: sure, anybody can start a new fork.

From a philosophical point of view, the alternative is that only a few designated somebodies can fork, which goes against the design goal of a having a fully decentralised network with no privileged nodes.

You can also see this as a distributed systems problem. A fork is just a divergence in the consensus layer. These happen all the time as short-lived forks when different miners produce different blocks with different sets of transactions. Typically, one of those forks gets abandoned immediately — only occasionally do you see a second block mined on the losing branch. In this sense, and from a technical perspective, the only thing that's special about the Segwit2X fork was planned for the coming weeks is that it would also change the consensus rules (by enabling larger blocks, up to 2MB from the current 1MB). Because the consensus rules change is a highly politicised issue, there's a distinct probability that whichever side ended up losing would decide to continue building on their own chain anyhow, thus effectively breaking the currency into two.