The scheduled execution of the bitcoin hard fork proposal Bitcoin Cash which is set to begin on August 1, 12:20 UTC, is hours away and yet the market, investors and traders remain confident in bitcoin and its ability to scale.
Earlier this week, bitcoin analyst and Civic CEO Vinny Lingham stated, “If I were running a hedge fund, I’d buy a ton of bitcoin and short them simultaneously. On August 1, dump bitcoin, cover shorts and dump BCH (Bitcoin Cash).”
Although Lingam has earned the title “Bitcoin Oracle” from the community for his accurate predictions on bitcoin price, there exists a limit of what technical analysis can achieve to predict the future price trend of bitcoin. Lingham essentially predicted the market to panic sell as the August 1 Bitcoin Cash hard fork approached. But in actuality, as BitGo engineer Jameson Lopp noted, it has been the exact opposite. In fact, bitcoin price rose from below $1,800 to $2,910 in the past 24 hours.
Bitcoin apparently hasn’t heard about tomorrow’s apocalyptic hard fork and is crashing in the wrong direction. https://t.co/kBkncJ4ora
— Jameson Lopp (@lopp) July 31, 2017
During a bitcoin hard fork, it is nearly impossible for businesses to operate normally and process bitcoin trades due to the alterations in security measures and systems a hard fork requires. As a result, on August 1, the vast majority of bitcoin exchanges are shutting down for nearly a full day to process BCH payouts.
For exchanges, allowing users and clients to withdraw BCH that is automatically credited to bitcoin holders is crucial. Some wallets including Breadwallet are taking a more cautious approach with the process while hardware wallets such as Trezor and Ledger have already provided explicit details and instructions on recovering the newly credited BCH funds.
However, prominent and well-respected developers including Paxos principal architect Jimmy Song and bitcoin developer Andrew Desantis explained that simply holding onto existing bitcoins and not jeopardizing private keys to receive newly credit BCH is the most secure way to deal with the hard fork.
Song appeared on bitcoin analyst and trader Tone Vays’ bitcoin-focused podcast World Crypto Network and discussed in detail with Vays on the possible security issues that may arise while manually crediting wallets with BCH.
“Right now, my backup is pretty secure. I know there is one backup in a Mac that doesn’t turn on, and another back up on a couple of USB thumbdrives. I’m not in a rush to get this bitcoin private key out because right now I know it is safe. The moment I plug this USB drive to some computer, the moment I get it out, the moment I change the wallet.dat file, I bring this bitcoin into the world and that scares me. I’m really keeping my bitcoin private.”
For bitcoin investors and traders that have stored their bitcoin on non-custodial platforms that offer users absolute control over their own private keys, manual processing of BCH is necessary. At the moment, Breadwallet, Ledger, Trezor and other wallet platforms have stated that they plan to provide a way for investors to receive their Bitcoin Cash after the fork.
It is highly likely that the market, investors and traders will remain confident in bitcoin due to the new features and fixes that will come as a result of Segwit activation.