I highly doubt now that there will be a fork.
But people are correct that you need to have ownership of your private keys on devices you control to be safe. The worst place to "store" bitcoin would be exchanges.
This latest push will go the same way "Classic" and "XT" did, which was nowhere....
Fork is still a possibility, good executed and seamless fork is nothing to be afraid of, it is split we want to avoid.
I think that 51% hashpower of BU miners and the BU emergent consensus mechanism could be used like a weapon to kill Bitcoin with kindness, like the gentle giant character in "Of Mice and Men". Or at least that's what the Unlimitards will say publicly.
If BU pushers can sybil attack the network with >51% BU nodes, and force a hard fork split with >51% hashrate, we may be a little screwed, as follows
- The sybil nodes vote for 1.01 MB
- BU miners mine 1.01MB block
- BTC chain elicits chain fork because >1MB
- BU miners mine <=1MB block
- BTC chain re-merges with BU chain, because >PoW
- BTC chain orphans every block since the 1st split
- BU miner mine 1.01 MB block
- Rinse and repeat
It's important to note, as long as BU wreckers control >51% of nodes, they can force the miners into a 1.01 MB > 1MB > 1.01 MB > 1MB dance in perpetuity. Bitcoin itself would be forced into an emergency hard fork if that happened, and it would almost certainly need to be a PoW change, unless there is a less disruptive solution.
And it need not be like that, if we can agree to a progressive PoW change and roll that out, before BU do something like this.
"But Carlton, why would Jihad and Vermin want to decimate confidence in Bitcoin and the whole cryptocoin field, throwing away their valuable BTC and ASICs?"
I can think of several $million reasons, some of which could include young pop stars sitting on Roger and Wu's faces, i.e. the sort of favours money alone can't buy.