This article aims to explain to long term bitcoin investors who dont understand the technical part of bitcoin as what is happening to bitcoin on 1st August 2017. Though some things mentioned below are technical, but i hope i have explained it good enough

SUMMARY

• "SEG-WIT" Short for SEGREGATED WITNESS a brief explanation.
• Alternative for segwit.
• NewYork Agreement.
• Effect on Bitcoin after Segwit
• Investors/bitcoin holders will own two coins if hard fork happens.
• Alternative plan against UASF (BIP148)
• The TWO Tokens "BTC 148" & "BTC Legacy"

Segwit (SEGREGATED WITNESS) A Brief Explantion.

SegWit-An Idea by Dr. Pieter Wuille

Each transaction in bitcoin network contains an input address, an output address and a digital signature to verify the authenticity of the transaction. 1st problem The digital signature is taking around 70% of the space on each transaction. Another issue by associating digital signature with transaction data is that the signature can be tampered with . Dr. Pieter Wuille suggested solution to this problem by segregating the digital signature from the transactions data.

What segwit does?

SegWit is the process by which the space in each block is "indirectly" increased by removing digital signature data from Bitcoin transactions. When blocks are made smaller, this frees up the capacity to add more transactions to the chain. SegWit empowered code overlooks the information appended to a mark by striping off the mark from inside the info and moving it to a structure towards the finish of a transaction. This would build the 1 MB constrain for piece sizes to almost 4 MB, in which 3MB information is only for signature part. Once the arrangement is actualized each square can suit more than 3 times of transactions contrasted with existing pieces

Alternative for SegWit

At the point when the segwit thought of isolating mark from transaction data another hypothesis came into picture. The thought as to build the standard block size measure from 1MB to  2mb or more without segwit or digital signature.

Segwit2Mb- The combined solution
Segwit2Mb aims to resolve the above conflict between different political positions among miners and developers regarding segwit activation vs an increase of the on-chain blockchain space through a standard block size increase. Segwit2Mb combines segwit as it is today in Bitcoin version 0.14 with a 2MB block size hard-fork activated ONLY if segwit activates.

NewYork Agreement

In May 2017, developers and miners together joined and reached an agreement at Bitcoin Scaling Agreement at Consensus 2017, known as NewYork Agreement. As an outcome, they unanimously agreed to immediately support two parallel upgrades to the bitcoin protocol explained below, which will be deployed simultaneously and based on the original Segwit2Mb proposal.

1. Activate Segregated Witness at an 80% threshold, means 80% of the miners have to agree. The 80% threshold was decreased from 95%.
2. Activate a 2 MB hard fork within six months

This mandatory activation of segwit deployment comes under Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 148 (BIP 148)

Effect on Bitcoin after Segwit

At the point when segwit happens, it does nothing to Bitcoin as a coin. It will stay as it as it is bacically a client enacted delicate fork or UASF, with no split.
At the point when standard block size increase, the coin will part into two, one running with existing 1MB square size and the updated one forked out with 2MB block size. This is planned to occur following 6 months of segwit activation.

Sounds brilliant right? But the trick lies in the first part. To understand this, we should understand what happens during segwit activation. Miners need to flag that they are prepared for segwit. On the off chance that the aggregate hash rate of miners who consent to segwit achieves majority, at that point the hubs following the first chain will redesign and start to take after the segwit initiated UASF chain.

The newly segwit activated BIP148 nodes will begin to orphan Bitcoin blocks not signaling Bit 1 (1 means agreeing with segwit) at its UASF forking point. In such an event, there is a chance that a significant number of financial transaction records will disappear from nodes that rejected segwit activation. Mining community calls this as "wipe out"

Alternative plan against UASF (BIP148)

"BITMAN" as a leading critic of segwit and a large part of the mining community have the assessment as the UASF chain exhibits a danger of the first chain (the chain which rejects segwit) being wiped out. On the off chance that there is no alternate course of action, all exchanges that happens on the first chain after the UASF forking point will confront the danger of being wiped out. As per them this has deplorable results for the whole Bitcoin ecosystem. They keep up the stand that UASF is an assault against clients and endeavors who can't help contradicting enacting SegWit at the present time without a square size increment.

                                   "USAF is an attack against users and enterprises who disagree with activating SegWit right now without a block size increase, which is a very important clause in the Hong Kong agreement made by the global Bitcoin community in February, 2016." BITMAN

To secure their advantage/interest, they plan for a user activated Hard Fork, or UAHF. They will do the hard fork at 12 hours and 20 mins later than UASF to keep up the first segwit not active chain. This hard forked block will acknowledge block of which the size is under 8MB and miners will delicate farthest point the square size to under 2MB.There will be a delicate fork run added into the protocol to confine the sigops (signature part) per transaction inside 20K.

The TWO Tokens "BTC 148" & "BTC Legacy

If this two events happens, here would be two types of Bitcoin tokens, "BTC 148" for coins on the soft forked chain, and "BTC Legacy" for coins on the chain that did not activate segwit. As an investor we don't need to worry as each bitcoin would effectively be copied to both chains. If you hold bitcoin right now, you will hold both "148 BTC" and "Legacy BTC" after the split.

Advice for Long term Investors

Donot store your bitcoin on online wallets or exchanges always keep them offline and keep in mind not to do transactions between 31st july till 3rd august wait and see which side camel is going to sit.

DISCLAIMER

 i have just compiled and wrote after numeorous discussions on forums etc and reading articles i am not an expert in crypto currency if i havent explained right please feel free to comment.