So, as long as I hold on to the bitcoins I bought before all this madness started I should be safe? Like when in a few years some fork is the declared winner, I can still just sell my bitcoins on that winner network? (assuming bitcoins will be worth anything after those shenanigans).
Depends how you are holding bitcoins. On another thread, it appeared that Coinbase might be doing something sketchy in the case of certain kinds of forks. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14806636
I'm holding them in a wallet.dat file of the original bitcoin (full node) client that I haven't started in maybe a year or more. More or less a completely offline stash.
So you should be safe. Wait for the fork to happen and end, update the client to the "winner" side of the fork, and you'll be able to do transactions normally. What might happen is the coins might lose some market value in the short term due to the hysteria surrounding the fork.
> update the client to the "winner" side of the fork
But will the bitcoin client (from bitcoin.org) update to the winning rules or will I need to download it from somewhere else depending on who the winner is?
