As you probably heard on Nov 15 there will be a hard fork on the BCH chain, due to disagreement over some old op_codes.

source

Right now not too much is clear, both parties want to win the chain under Nakamoto consensus so it will be interesting to see how that plays out. But the minority chain will almost certainly survive. Even when the people initiating the fork declare defeat, there likely will be people continuing to mine the minority chain, because of the big publicity it has already received. I will probably do it should the hash rate becomes small enough, just for the fun of it.

So I am quite certain that there will be two chains and if you hold your private keys you will get coins on both chains.

The Price Pump

Before the fork we have seen a big rise in BCH prices and volume

[from coinmarketcap.com]

But is this actually rational behavior? People seem to like the idea to double their coins and want to have as much BCH as possible to collect 'free money'. However, I think this is faulty logic. There is no free lunch. All the value in the coins comes from the use case and adoption alone.

The question to ask is if there are additional opportunities realised when forking the coins. Looking at ETH and ETC this is probably the case since the development in the ETC community did take a quite different route and focusses on different aspects representing more the 'code is law' mentality.

Right now I cannot see this for BCH and BitcoinSV. I see that BCH is trying to differentiate more from BTC, which is always good since the space should be as diverse as possible. But the planned fork remains somewhere in-between BTC and BCH and I do not see a big open niche there.

The fork will likely increase the use-cases very slightly and thus in a perfect world the value of the combined coins should be slightly above the current marketcap of BCH. Not 20%, more like 2 or 5% higher.

But we are not living in a perfect world. Community, adoption, marketing and resources for development are limited. And splitting the community comes at a price for both coins. Right now I cannot see how a small bit added diversity (op_codes I have not seen many people asking for in BTC) could be positive when needing to split the community over it. This was questionable in the case of BCH from BTC and is much more questionable now where you split a small coin over tiny differences.

My analysis is therefore that I expect the combined value of the coins after the fork to be somewhat lower than BCH before. Simply because the business proposals of both coins individually become weaker. Best case would be one coin failing and the other uniting the community in which case we are back to normal BCH (with or without these op_codes).

I have used the opportunity to sell some BCH, lets see if I can buy back when things are settled. For the days after the 15th, If you do not know what you are doing do not transact until things calm down. There is always the risk of replay attacks and other mistakes. If you hold your private keys, there is no rush to claim your coins.