I admit that my design is universally better than bitcoin's. Not selecting a fork is completely by design choice, because it is the only way to be 99%+ attack proof. There are two ways a fork can occur: if there is a legitimate split such as a country hitting the "off switch" on the internet, in which case everyone is aware; the other is an intentionally dishonest split by creating a fork in secret or not-secretly dropping the TBs of the honest side.
In the latter case, everyone is still aware of the fork because consensus either is or it isn't. They know that one of the two halves is being intentionally dishonest. Therefore they cannot be fooled. What does it matter if they cannot initially determine which fork is dishonest if they can't be fooled into doing anything?
Even still, as long as the individual is aware of both networks, both networks must operate identically in regards to tx activity or the dishonest network will be easily ousted. The dishonest half can *not* do anything nefarious while the people are deciding which is honest. So if both are available and both are operating, there really is no network interruption.
What if the honest friends are on different branches? What if they are offline? What if they, like me, have no idea what to do and they just look back at me in hope I will somehow point them to the right branch?
No, that doesn't answer any security question. It's like saying that you have to check bitcoin branches manually to spot someone reversing transaction.
No, it isn't like bitcoin branches. Some pseudo-anonymous group of peers has elected to bring on a massive fork of the network, and everyone knows it. If the network has any kind of use, this will be massive, massive news. If it is some nefarious evilcorp, that means every honest merchant is not partaking in the split and will say so. If it is some evil government, they either say nothing or give some ultimatum to attempt to force its citizens to use its fork or whatnot.
This attack can't just happen without some kind of agenda, or the money is as good as burned. The decision to which network is honest will be simple unless somehow a large group of various entities and people decide the network isn't doing what they want. In this case, section 4 comes into play and they can create their own network with the rules they want. They will not be able to force the users of the network to use those rules without the consent of the people using the network.
This is not clear because the PoW is anonymous. Bitcoin cannot aggregate PoW blocks that are attacking the network into separate piles. It has no clue and dumbly accepts whatever chain is longer. Since there is no penalty for attacking the network, nothing can be done about it anyway other than developers patching out each attack that anonymous PoW throws at the network.