In my opinion, if it's not happening already, this is an example of things to come in a near future. I believe Bitcoin will be attacked in all possible ways: through mining, the network, the users, the regulation (legally),etc. If you don't think Bitcoin will be restlessly attacked, you've misunderstood how disruptive it's, and the real impact in our future. You don't go and poke a $20 trillion industry and go, "Hey, we're going to disrupt you!" You can't just wait for it to roll over. This is consider as a serious threat to a lot of governments, financial institutions, and a lot of people who don't want to see crypto-currencies emerged and succeed.
If a fork happens, we get to learn what happens when a fork attack occurs. Anyone who thinks a fork will be unopposed is quickly going to discover that this will be a battle on all fronts. Inevitably the two sides are going to attack each other on the network, with denial-of-service attacks, with hash rate; they're going to attack each other publicly, privately, anonymously and not. Every bug in the software will get poked and poked again, so they better fix them well. The battle becomes "who has the best software development team? How quickly can they maintain that code and keep uptime?" That race is only 7 blocks wide. I don't think the people who are threatening to do a hard fork have thought clearly about the implications. This will allow Bitcoin to test all the attack vectors (nodes, relays, hashing, replay transactions, etc). And the result will be a Bitcoin that's battle-hardened, because it will have survived a fork attack and we will better understand what happens under such highly contentious conditions. It's very important to not mistake smooth sailing for good sailors.
If any altcoin somehow overtakes bitcoin and gets to this scale, they will have to deal with the same scaling and governance controversies. Many of them will end up centralized or with failures in architecture. These are the rites of passage; you first have to grow up to face them. How many of the other blockchains are preparing for this? I think not many, because they aren't paying attention. This is a fantastic experiment but it's not easy. This is a game with $20 billion at stake, so it will happen sooner than later...
As crypto-currencies users, we need to prepare our mindset and get ready for this day to come, by wisely use / store our bitcoin's private keys (same for any alt coins we are using). Remember, the money is not really yours if your don't own / controlled the private keys, which are used to sign the transactions. For those handling a decent amount of crypto currency on daily basis, this is my suggestions to you:
1- Don't leave money un-exchanged or to a third party: the same way you don't trust traditional banks to hold your money, don't trust anyone else... remember this is a new world, and even companies offering cryto currency storage as a service are new in the business! their all startup trying to find their way in this new environment, so how can you trust them? Beside, you don't want to trade a third party for another..
2- Use a multi tier storage approach: You don't want to keep all your money in the same wallet do you? i guess not... remember, everything stored online can be hacked, and there are always people out there trying to do so, believe me. So what you might consider doing is using multi tier approach to store your private keys (your money!) as follow:
- Very cold storage: This is where you want to put your principal savings. For me it is the equivalent of buying gold as a long term investment to secure your wealth...despite the attack scenario describe earlier most prediction about bitcoin is that the value will grow again and again...So i believe it's a good idea to keep some as safely as possible, because you are storing value. You can achieve this with an encrypted hard drive, properly secure with a memorized passphrase (that you can share with who you consider your next of kin, just in case..). Think about it.
- Cold Storage: Can be achieve with hardware wallet, properly secured as well with 2 factor authentication. Can be used as intermediary storage for occasional heavy spending, while traveling, etc...
- Warm storage: If you run a business where you send or receive payment often in crypto-currency, paying suppliers or contractors, etc..this is where it should happen. Usually it can be done with web wallet or mobile apps wallet, But never leave an amount on money you can't afford to loose here. If you receive a payment with a margin benefit, consider transferring it to your cold or very cold storage. This is critical to understand.
- Hot storage: This is optional as you can make most of your spending from your warm storage. But for those of you very mobile and using bitcoin to pay in shopping malls, grocery, etc, this can be useful with a mobile app wallet. It should only hold the same amount you are comfortable to keep in your "traditional wallet" you carry in your pocket.
So what do you think ? your thoughts and feedback will be much more appreciate...
Inspired by the talk of Andreas M. Antonopoulos (Bitcoin Q&A: The Scaling Rites of Passage).