As bitcoin’s long-lasting debate is heading toward a crucial phase, bitcoiners, exchanges, miners and every part of the community are preparing for possible outcomes.

OKex announced this Monday that they support all competing forms of bitcoin and grant each option to their customers and market. In addition, they developed five policies to prepare for potential bitcoin forks.

“During the potential fork, from 2017-07-31 to 2017-08-02, we will suspend Bitcoin deposits and withdrawals due to potential technical risks such as replay attacks and other issues that may cause network instability. We will further advise on specific timing but we advise that you deposit Bitcoin in advance in order to not affect your trading.”(Read more at https://blog.okex.com/2017/07/17/how-okex-is-preparing-for-the-potential-bitcoin-forks/)

Mining pool ViaBTC who has been supporting SegWit2X says they will remain their stance while providing another option for users.

“We will designate the token “Bitcoin Cash” (BCC) to the possible split coin led by the activation of UAHF and the arrangements are as follows:

Mining pool: Release BCC Mining Pool (Read more at https://medium.com/@ViaBTC/statement-on-bitcoin-user-activated-hard-fork-6e7aebb67e67)

ViaBTC proposed to start an ICO project buying or lending hashrate to support UAHF. But it’s been a month and they haven’t released more info about the project.

Hashnest, a cloud mining platform of Bitmain, announced this Monday that:

“All users on Hashnest, please be advised below.

To avoid risk of the possible bitcoin fork, Hashnest decide to stop all the services for bitcoin wallet , hashrate market and PACMIC contracts payback during 2017/07/31 8:00-2017/08/03 8:00 beijing time.”

Huobi says they will stop Bitcoin services in the face of a potential split and more information will be announced later.

As simple users, we’d better keep an eye on the important dates in the crucial phase and secure the storage of our private keys.

• July 14: Deployment of BTC1
• July 21: Start signalling BIP91
• July 23: Possible blockage of BIP91
• July 25: Possible activation of BIP91
• July 29: First deadline of BIP91
• July 31: BIP141 Deadline
• August 1: Activation of BIP148
• August 4: Potential launch of Bitcoin ABC
• August 15: Potential change of working test of BIP148

BTC1, a fork of the Bitcoin Core software client, is resulted from the New York Agreement. BTC1’s alpha release was announced by developer Jeff Garzik of Bitmain Warranty and its beta software was released on June 30. You can see on the website that there are 72  full nodes signalling BTC1 now out of the 8000 nodes. It was expected to see a large portion of BU full nodes signalling btc1 full nodes. But apparently, this is not happening.

Among all of the scaling attempts trying to activate Segwit, BIP91 enjoys the first mover advantage as several mining pools have already started signalling support for BIP91 on July 17. Now 75.8% hashrate are signalling BIP91 . Plus, Antpool, Bitcoin.com and BTC.com have switched to support BIP91. 

The good news about BIP148 is that a large number of full nodes and bitcoin applications are in favor of it. BTCC, F2Pool, Bixin and BW are mining Segwit pools. If more hash power signal Segwit before August 1, it will be likely for BIP148 to be activated. At this particular moment, we should give special attention to change of hash power signalling Segwit.

Anyway, it’s a good timing to buy bitcoin at a low price and hold it for long term. Given time, I believe bitcoin price will surprise you when Segwit is activated.