What is going to happen on august 1st ?
The bitcoin blockchain is going to split between the original Bitcoin (XBT) that will adopt SegWit 2x (Segregation witness) and BIP148 (Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 148) and a new bitcoin : Bitcoin Cash (BCH). For XBT, that will solve some of the problems of bitcoins (mostly time of bitcoins transactions). But things are very uncertain for Bitcoin right now. Around 80% of people (this is my own gessing) are backing the Bitcoin Core team wich is behind XBT. But the Chineese group ViaBTC (mostly Bitmain) have decided to make a hard fork that will led to BCH.
If you own bitcoins you must know that there's a very high chance that the bitcoin (XBT) price will go down for a while after the split. We are in unknown territorry here, and investers, in general, don't like uncertainty... So (i may be wrong) but i gess it is probably going down for a while then it will start to rise again. So what should you do if you have bitcoins ?
The safest option : transfer your funds to a solid ledger
Like Trezor or Ledger Nano S. Your funds will be safe there. Ledger has already announced that they will keep XBT for sure and depending of what is going to happen after august 1st, they'll propose tools to go for the BCH (if users want to).
Second option : keep your bitcoins on a wallet where you own the private keys
Typically this means NOT COINBASE guys ! They've already said it in a mailing to their customers (see capture below), they support XBT only :
If you don't know what private keys are, have a look at this, then go to your account settings to see if you have access to it.
Third option : cash out in your fiat currency
Another option is to cash out all your bitcoins for your own currency. Bitcoin is quite high right now so you'lI get a good price (if you didn't buy when it was high !). And if bitcoin goes down (even just a bit) after the split you may be able to get more bitcoins and so when it goes back up make some profit. I believe bitcoin is going to fall a bit after the split, but i don't know in what amount and let things be clear this is MY OWN PERSONNAL GUESS.
If you like taking risks
You can choose a wallet that will support both XBT and BCH. If you have a wallet where you own the private key, you'll be able to get your BCH too, using your private key on a future BCH client (i don't know one yet).
For instance, for Europeans, Kraken will support both blockchains after the split. So you'll end up (if everything goes well) with your amount of XBT AND the same amount of BCH (coming out of thin air !!). It will probably worth nothing or not much as nearly everyone is backing up the "traditional branch", but hey who knows ? It may also be worth something one day depending on what is going to happen.
For users with Ledger hardware, i also suggest you [take a close look at this](https://blog.ledger.co/securing-your-free-bitcoin-cash-stash-d50aff765688] if you want to get your bitcoin cash stash !
Nice day to you all and hope that the XBT will stay strong !
Nevil