By Because nothing will happen to Bitcoin on August 1st. Bitcoin price has been going up and down mainly due to the fears of so called hard fork that could potentially split Bitcoin into two or more chains. The scaling debate has divided the Bitcoin community into two camps; Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin Unlimited.
Few months ago, Bitcoin Core proposed BIP 148, which was essentially the activation of Segwit on August 1st. Core was growing tired of coordinating with miners, who had been stalling the upgrade. Good news is that BIP 148 is no longer relevant because miners have begun the activation process on their own. That said, users should still run BIP148 code to make sure miners don’t change their mind last minute (although it’s highly unlikely).
Bitmain is the most influential miner in the industry and operator of the largest Bitcoin mining pool, Antpool – currently mining 25% of all blocks. Initially Bitmain introduced the possibility of hard forking the Bitcoin Blockchain in order to create Bitcoin Cash. But in its later announcement, Bitmain emphasized that the user-activated hard fork (UAHF) was merely a contingency plan for user-activated soft fork (UASF).
Furthermore, Bitmain added that it did not intend to execute hard fork if the mining community, industry, and users came together and agreed on one activation mechanism – Segregated Witness (SegWit). In the end, the mining community locked in BIP 91 on July 21st, which led to the lock-in of BIP 141 and finalization of SegWit activation.
What will happen on August with certainty is that Bitcoin Cash (an altcoin) will be created by a group of miners led by ViaBTC. Side note: BitMain owns major stake in ViaBTC. However, this shouldn’t worry investors at all. Bitcoin Cash (BCC) will have no effect on the real Bitcoin network and the users who use Bitcoin core will be fully unaffected.
It is important to note that this is not the first time we are seeing a Bitcoin hard fork. In an open source development ecosystem, developers are free to fork off a project to create their own. Litecoin drifted from Bitcoin. Ethereum Classic forked off from Ethereum. In the past we’ve also had “Bitcoin Dark” and “Bitcoin Plus” that have tried to take advantage of the name ‘Bitcoin’, but alas they are now buried somewhere.
Last week, soon after the launch of Bitcoin Cash, major Bitcoin exchanges including Coinbase and BitMex clarifies that they are not in favor of Bitcoin Cash and hence, cannot support the hark fork led by ViaBTC. Coinbase cited BCC’s contentious nature as the reason, while BitMEX noted that Bitcoin Cash will likely lead to serious security issues.