you might end up with a number of isolated BTC forks though. E.g. imagine if all transatlantic/transpacific communication was lost for a few days, america would have it's own chain, and people would not be willing to switch to a fork without their transactions on as they wouldn't be able to recover they goods they traded for the BTC at the time of the transaction
It's kind of worse than that. The various (temporary) islands, by default, would not make any decision to 'switch' to different islands. As islands reconnect, each time that happens, the larger island wins, and the smaller island automatically switches over.
Which I think agrees with the parent post right? If there is a network partition, and people attempt to keep using bitcoin, then there will be consistency issues.
Is there some facility for incorporating (non-conflicting) transfers from the discarded chain into the primary?
otherwise it sounds like all txns made during the split on the losing chains will simply be discarded, which doesn't sound desirable at all.
