BITCOIN HARDFORK / SOFTFORK & SEGWIT - What's all about

with the soon outstanding decision to fork BTC, there will be three options:
Soft Fork, Hard Fork and Segwit2x

Softfork means that the BTC fork is not mandatory, has no priority and all related to Bitcoin will run without interruption.
It's like a windows Patch without restart.
BTC remains BTC in this case.
"In October 2016, Bitcoin Core’s 0.13.1 release featured a soft fork that included a scaling improvement aiming to optimize the bitcoin blocksize"

Hardfork on the other hand will require an update interrupting the flow of Bitcoin for some hours. Like a reboot after a critical Windows Update.
Here we will have two Bitcoins: BTC as we know it and BTU (Bitcoin Unlimited)
Like ETH (Ethereum) and ETC (Ethereum Classic).
This happend already after SEGWIT of Ethereum (Seggregation witness).

Both are getting quite necessary, as slowly Bitcoin transfers get heavier, slower and more expensive, as we all know.
Both forks are finally good for long term investments.

Now there could be the SEGWIT2x which means that the blocksize of BTC will be increased to 2 MB as softfork and creation of BTU (Bitcoin Unlimited) as hardfork..
Both options have equal number of pros and cons. Mostly has to do with Block sizing, and the fork of BTC and BTU.

There are three possible scenarios, depending of the outcome, which is voted by the mining pools:

All of your Bitcoins will become BTC only
All of your Bitcoin will become BTU only
You will have doubled your coins and get an equal amount of BTC and BTU

This can cause the price of Bitcoins to drop significantly..at least initially. We saw that with ETH/ETC
Long term, Bitcoins will continue to rise, and my opinion also BTU.
For maximum security, or if you have a lot of bitcoins, use TREZOR or Ledger hardware storage. For small investors, use Electrum or Exodus, a self hosted wallet in which you have a private key to. Both of these options supports BTC and BTU.
You should in any case get yout your bitcoins from all exchanges, like Kraken, Coinbase, etc, as they will stop the trading until all is clear.
If a fork does happen this way you will own both currencies...
If you fear about expensive-bought BTC, you should maybe invest in AltCoins, as they hopefully will not be heavily impacted by the SEGWIT2x, or just sit and wait until BTC rises again and much higher...

I hope you found here some useful info. Und für die deutsche Gemeinschaft, schreibt mir gerne auf deutsch, ich werde ebenfalls auf deutsch antworten. Schöne Grüsse.

Enjoy :-) The Fork on the 1. August !