Where is the beef?

[deisik]

It's the mining aspect that's concerning, unlimited reached >40% of blocks mined yesterday if I'm not wrong. Also anyone can be a node, these numbers are hardly reliable

Ahh, I see now... So this is really about nodes miners are running. Ok, thank you for the explanation.

No actually nodes are ran by many other normal users and bitcoin service providers along with the miners but miners play important role in hard forks. After hard fork the network which will have majority of mining power will survive while the one which doesn't have much support from miners will ultimately die

I don't think this is a correct explanation

After the fork, the fork hashing power becomes inconsequential to the remaining miners. It is the same as if some miners left and then a new altcoin sprang up which started using all this power. I'm heavily inclined to think that people are overexaggerating the power of miners. In other words, there is no such power at all, it is an illusion mostly. If most users stay with the old version and shy away from the fork (and that's what full nodes supporting SegWit explicitly tell us), all this hashing power will be utterly useless and eventually just wasted away

[dimonchik13]

No actually nodes are ran by many other normal users and bitcoin service providers along with the miners but miners play important role in hard forks. After hard fork the network which will have majority of mining power will survive while the one which doesn't have much support from miners will ultimately die.

Thanks for that... Could we see repeat of Ethereum? Both ETH and ETC are still alive 10 month after the fork with sufficient hash power to support each branch. Ethereum brand has survived so far... I guess ... Nah, we should be fine.  

The cases are different the Ethereum fork happened very early in the life of the coin a fork now for bitcoin could spell disaster, because even if at the end it works out many investors will leave and never come back .

This is certainly worrying me now. I can barely grasp the technical details. I'm one of those users who got into bitcoin just using local exchanges and use that to send money or buy bitcoins and hold them. I don't know now if this would cause my coins to lose value. I'm not surprised that some people have been selling off their coins. True some of those might be "whales" or whatever but there are also probably those who just find this all complicated and want out before they lose money.

The chances for a hard fork are low at the moment it does not seem like either side wants to get out but if at some point BU earned enough support then there is the chance they may try it anyway since they will feel they have a chance in that scenario of becoming bitcoin and not an alt.

I understand that for beginners, these nuances can not be known so immediately. How can you be aware of this and not worry about your coins. Probably it is better to have patience, and wait until the end, keeping your bitcoin in your wallet.