Just to clear any doubt here, I don’t represent any crypto platform or startup, I’m an individual investor and huge believer in the Blockchain and crypto-currency future.
Let’s start.
Investors don’t like uncertainty, whether its real-estate, forex, commodity or crypto-currency, they don’t know how to manage their fear when it comes to their money, computers do :-)
Most people who are holding Bitcoin (BTC) know or should know that in the following next weeks there is going to be a huge uncertainty, because of the current Bitcoin scalability issues there are multiple plans(BIPS) to solve it , but because of the distributed architecture/people it’s hard to control and agree on major milestones like this.
In the software development world you have the option to work very hard and support legacy code or going faster and cheaper without legacy support and use only the new code, hard-fork vs soft-fork.
The investor perspective
When the average investor tries to digest the news these days he gets very confused, we have — BIP141, BIP148, BIP91, UASF, SEGWIT, SEGWIT2X, SOFT-FORK, HARD-FORK, OMGGGG :-(
He usually analyze the situation much simpler:
-Best case scenario — new software, higher block size 2MB, same coin.
-Worst case scenario — multiple software versions, multiple blocks, coin split.
Following this he is going to ask himself these questions:
1. What are the chances for best vs worst?
2. Do I have an alternative? i.e. Ethereum
3. If I’ll take the risk would the ROI be worth it?
So because there is no science prediction here and so many unknown interests it depends how far you would go with your risks.
My prediction
These type of events make you think about the future of the crypto and if it’s possible to control this distributed “monster”.
It looks like there are not so many paths right now to achieve both segwit’s software support and the 2MB/8MB hard fork vs many other paths where we don’t have a consensus and then Bitcoin split.
In this specific case I think everyone fear from coin split therefore this segwit will be adopted eventually.