It was widely known that a bitcoin hard fork is scheduled to happen on August 1. This has been going for years now to end the stalemate between the various parties (miners, developers, and users) which has stalled the evolution of bitcoin.
Transaction fees are very high right now because of this. This may play out in a couple of different ways but right now, we are sure that there will be a chain split resulting in two different tokens- Bitcoin Core (BTC) and Bitcoin Cash (BCC).
We usually get an advise to pull out our bitcoins from exchanges onto our private wallets so that we can have full control over our private keys. In this way, we will be able to get the equivalent Bitcoin Cash (BCC) of our current BTC holdings (i.e. If you have 5 BTC before the fork, then you’ll own 5 BTC or 5 BCC after the fork.)
Here are the possibilities of things that might happen after the bitcoin hard fork:
1. Many people might think that BCC is a free money, especially right now that it has a futures value of $342.23. The result of this is that people sell their alternative coins before the hard fork on August 1 to buy BTC in order to avail of free BCC. Essentially, they will get free money if both BTC and BCC survives.
2. There is a likelihood that BCC crashes in the initial days of trading as everyone rushes to sell it.
3. If BTC gets the support of the majority over BCC, then altcoins might start to go up again in value together with BTC. If BCC gets the majority support, those who bought BCC futures now will cheer as they will see their investment rise.
4. There is also the possibility of both BTC and BCC survives and both will have value. Eventually, if there is surge in trading volume for BCC, more and more exchanges will support it and will make it available for trading in their platforms. This is what happened to Ethereum because of the hard fork caused by the hack in DAO - we now have Ethereum and Ethereum Classic.
5. Litecoin (LTC) might go down after the hard fork. It has been seen by many as a more the scalable version of Bitcoin. Therefore, if bitcoin’s scalability problems were addressed, LTC becomes rather uninteresting and might lose its value.
How about you, what do you think will happen?