People are going full on FUD!
Everywhere I go I seem to come across people talking about how they are HODLing their crypto, and not a single person openly admitting they sold. The truth is that the primary factor that determines the price of any given crypto is the amount of buy and sell orders. If there are more buy orders than sell orders (bullish) then the price goes up and if there are more sell orders than buy orders (bearish) the price goes down.
The simple fact is that if everybody was really HODLing the price would not be crashing, it would be at least steady.
The price dip is a bit of a vicious cycle, people start to panic, which causes them to sell their crypto, which lowers the price, which makes people panic, which makes people sell, which lowers the price. This goes on and on and on until the people with lots of money decide to start buying again.
Don't worry about BIP 148
If you do not understand what BIP 148 is or how it effects you, I will briefly explain what will happen in laymans terms. In short, on August the 1st, the bitcoin blockchain will split (fork) into 2 chains. On one hand, you will have legacy Bitcoin and on the other, you will have the new BIP Bitcoin. This will be only temporary as long as there are more nodes running BIP than there are legacy bitcoin nodes. At that point, the legacy bitcoin blockchain will be integrated into the BIP one, essentially making them one again. This does come with problems and for some users will involve risk if steps are not taken to avoid loss of bitcoins.
BIP 148 is not something I worry about. There are two types of users of bitcoin. The HODLers and the traders.
HODL
If you just HODL then this whole thing is really not an issue for you. Just keep your bitcoin in a safe place and let all this nonsense pass.
traders
This is where things can get sticky, there are a few things you need to do in order to stay safe. First you NEED to have control of your private keys. (To be honest this is advised for anything anyway) secondly you need to set up both legacy and BIP bitcoin nodes. This isn't very expensive to set up in terms of electricity but can slow down or not run on low end computers. And thirdly you need to make sure that the trading platform supports both versions of bitcoin.
Truth be told, I am just going to use Ethereum as a base for my trading. I would rather just keep my bitcoin secure and let this whole thing ride out. The fact is that people are getting scared about nothing. BIP 148 will come and when it does, it will overtake legacy bitcoin and will Intergrate it, resulting in lower transaction fees and more transactions per second.
Conclusion
To my view, all you are doing by panicking and selling is lowering the price for people who are a bit more calm and collected (like me) to buy up all your cheap bitcoins. Part of me wants people to FUD the price of bitcoin down to $1... I would buy huge amounts of them and then retire and live the life of luxury when the price rebounds, but I don't want you all to lose all your money, I am not that selfish. Guys and girls, I suggest you become less emotional and be strong. Bitcoin WILL survive, Bitcoin WILL rebound and bitcoin WILL take the world by storm. All you need to do is crack open a beer, lay back and relax, all will be fine!
Happy Trading
Viking
