August 1st And The End Of Bitcoin? Make Or Break August 1st Event Is Coming For Bitcoin Investors MUST READ IF YOU ARE BITCOIN INVESTOR

Summary point of this post...

1.Under Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) 148, Bitcoin will be undergoing a user activated soft fork on August 1, 2017.

2.There are three possible outcomes of the soft fork, although the exact outcome is unknown as the outcome will depend on the actions of the nodes on the network.

3.In a worst case scenario, BIP 148 could cause Bitcoin to chain split into two separate blockchains, one with SegWit activated and one without.

4.User Activated Segregated Witness to happen on August 1st.

5.Miners may hard fork after 12 hours of Segwit.

6.Investors will own two coins if hard fork happens.

7.Long term Investors are advised to move their bitcoins from exchanges to personal wallets like hardware wallets or paper wallets.

SOME MORE INFO IN DETAIL
Before we get started, let me try and define some very important terms, which I hope will make it easier for me to fully convey what exactly is going to happen on August 1st.

Hard Fork - A hard fork is a permanent divergence in the blockchain, that occurs when non-upgraded nodes can't validate blocks created by upgraded nodes that follow newer block validation rules. This can be caused by a change in a blockchain's protocol that makes previously invalid blocks/transactions valid, and as such requires all nodes or users to upgrade to the latest version of the protocol software. This essentially creates a fork in the blockchain, one path which follows the new, upgraded blockchain, and one path which continues along the old path. Generally, after a short period of time, those on the old chain will realize that their version of the blockchain is outdated or irrelevant and quickly upgrade to the latest version.

Soft Fork - A soft fork is a change to the bitcoin protocol where some previously valid blocks/transactions are made invalid, and the rest of the previously valid blocks/transactions are kept valid. Old nodes will still recognize the new blocks as valid. Soft forks don't require any nodes to upgrade since all blocks with the new soft-forked rules also follow the old rules, therefore old clients accept them. This kind of fork requires only a majority of the miners to upgrade in order to enforce the new rules.

Bitcoin transaction basics
A bitcoin transaction tells the bitcoin blockchain network that the owner of the bitcoin has authorized the transfer of bitcoin to another owner. The new owner can now spend these bitcoins by creating another transaction that authorizes transfer to another owner, and so on, in a chain of ownership. So in nutshell bitcoin transactions are nothing but creating a chain of ownership as the value of bitcoin is moved from address to address.

Exponential growth of bitcoin transactions
If we look at the 2 year graph on the number of transactions on bitcoin we would get a better understanding. In 2010, the number of transactions per block was below 50. In 2015, the number of transactions registered in a block was in a range of 650 to 800 transactions. Till then it has grown exponentially and in May 21, 2017, the number of transactions in a block reached an all time high of 2218.

SegWit-An Idea by Dr. Pieter Wuille
Every transaction in bitcoin network contains an input address from where the value is coming, an output address to where the value is going and a digital signature to verify the authenticity of the transaction. This digital signature associated with each transaction is taking 65% of the space in a given transaction. Another problem by associating digital signature with transaction data is that the signature can be tampered to change the transaction id and later claim for refund. Dr. Pieter Wuille suggested solution to this problem by segregating the digital signature from the transactions data.