It is simple: Hold your keys. :)
If a hard fork occurs, what will happen to my bitcoins?
Depending on how you store your bitcoins, e.g. desktop wallet, online wallet, exchange…etc, you can expect one of three scenarios:
- All of your coins will become BTC only
- All of your coins will become BTU only.
- Your coins will be doubled, so if you had 2 coins before the fork occurs, you will have 2 BTC and 2 BTU after forking is completed.
The exact outcome depends on how you are storing your coins and whether or not you control the private keys of your bitcoins. If you store your coins using an online wallet or a cryptocurrency exchange, then you don’t control your private keys, so you are letting another entity choose the fate of your coins.
To ensure that you will have both BTC and BTU, in event of a fork, you should store your coins via a local wallet on your machine, so that you would be controlling your coins’ private keys.
Good work @petrvl. But there's much more than this that you need to remember if this hard fork happens.