1. UASF or BIP148 is no longer the issue since BIP91 has locked-in and 100% of blocks being mined are SegWit blocks. You can follow at xbt.eu

(If any of the jargon is not understandable please post your questions in the comments section).

2. Most of us assumed the next contentious fork discussions would occur in 2-3 months' time when the New York Agreement (NYA or SegWit2x as it is sometimes referred) proposed to implement a hard fork adjusting the base block capacity from 1MB to 2MB.

3. The issue now at hand is the announcement of the Bitcoin Cash protocol (BCC) which intends to perform a hard fork on August 1st. Their desire is to improve transactional throughput and is pretty much backed by the same people in the NYA camp. Many exchanges and wallet providers have outright dismissed BCC and will not support the coin.

4. I have not gone through BCC's protocol changes in full so technically I can't really comment. I take hints from developers I "trust" or agree with in principle. I also don't really know the developers who built the BCC code and who will maintain the BCC chain. From what I can tell the main change is to increase block size to 8MB and it seems as if they are intending on removing SegWit.

5. Hard forks are technically difficult and seldom go off without problems. This fork is rushed and, to me, does not add any improvements onto the Bitcoin legacy chain.

6. The fork will create a new coin and all holders of BTC will own an equivalent amount of BCC, provided that they control their own private keys. If a custodial service holds your BTC then it will depend on them whether or not you will be credited with BCC.

7. I expect BCC to take a minor amount of hashing power away from BTC but, over time, will diminish to a negligible amount (in a similar way that happened with Bitcoin XT and Bitcoin Classic).

8. The uncertainty around the fork will keep the BTC price artificially low and it may even drop a couple hundred $'s possibly more.

BCC futures are currently trading at around $450. Over time I expect BCC price to fall to $0.

My suggestion is to keep your private keys safe until the whole situation settles. If you know of an exchange that will list BCC and you are confident handling your keys, then you could profit by immediately selling your BCC for more BTC.

9. Of course this all still contingent on BCC actually going ahead and forking the network. It's possible that they only announced it to gauge public perception. Once the dust finally settles (approx. 2 weeks from now), I expect BTC price to rise sharply.

🐢