A neutral response would probably not use the phrasing 'muddle through' with regards to the solution endorsed by most of the technical experts in the Bitcoin space.
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Right now there are 3 implementations of Bitcoin in the wild, and each of the 3 will react differently to different network events. The network is essentially splitting apart, with each fragment driven by a different faction.
If you don't know what the different factions are, you probably don't need to. Its needlessly involved, highly political, and full of echo-chambers and shouting matches.
What happens largely depends on how much support each faction has. Unfortunately, there's no real way to measure how much support each faction has until the fork actually occurs. Each faction thinks that its the largest by a significant margin, and thinks that the other factions have used underhanded techniques to bolster their visible support.
When the rubber meets the pavement, we will know though. If the network splits into three pieces, likely the coin price for each piece will move around violently, and one portion of the network will probably end up with a much higher coin price than the other parts. Or maybe it'll be an even three-way split, which will make things in the Bitcoin world very confusing.
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As a huge Bitcoin fan, I hate to say this, but if you aren't clued into the various events, and you can't name the three factions or explain the beliefs of each, you should just stay away for a while. If you get pulled into the split without knowing what's going on, you are very likely to lose money. There will certainly be opportunists trying to take advantage of the situation, and you, being ignorant of the situation, will be the one who gets taken advantage of.
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If you do know what's going on, you can name the factions, etc, then what you should do is pretty simple. When the split happens, sell all of your coins on the forks that you disagree with, and use the resulting money to buy coins on your preferred fork.
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For anyone who cares, my alignment is with the status quo. I feel great animosity towards the hardfork faction (confusingly called Segwit2x), precisely because they have forced a situation where people who don't know what's going on are able to get hurt. They have also repeatedly, repeatedly, ignored very sound advice from the technical experts of the industry.
The UASF faction (confusingly, a 'pro Segwit' and 'anti Segwit2x' faction) has my spiritual support, but I don't think they have the numbers behind them to make a difference. I don't think running the UASF software is the right move.
I personally believe that overwhelmingly, the vast majority of people who use Bitcoin are probably largely unaware of what is happening, and are running the status-quo software (confusingly, the 'Segwit' software, or the 'Bitcoin-core' software). I'm guessing when the forks all happen, it'll be pretty dominantly vanilla Bitcoin with the highest price, and then a few weeks later it'll all be a bad memory, and nothing will have happened at all.
My view is that SegWit is a bandaid, not a cure: while it would give Bitcoin some breathing room, it doesn't fix the underlying constraints and is not alone going to solve scaling, hence "muddle through".
That's a not very informed view. Segwit involves segwit, but a very large number of previously pending enhancements that needed a soft fork to activate (core is conservative about any kind of fork) It has dramatic scaling capability due to segwit, it allows lightening network and other solutions to be built on BTC, and in fact, in my opinion will be the last scaling solution BTC ever needs because it will enable unlimited scaling via off chain and side chain transactions.
If you are keeping all the forked coins, you probably don't have a strong ideological opinion. It's not about being 'wrong' in this case, it's about ideological alignment. If you follow my advice, you will more or less end up with the same amount of money as you started with, regardless of where the prices of the coins end up (as long as you wait through the early volatility stages).
If you aren't ideologically aligned, holding onto all forks is a perfectly sane choice.
Profit trumps ideology even when you hold strong views.
For example, in this experiment small payments for correct and "don't know" responses sharply diminished the gap between Democrats and Republicans in responses to "partisan" factual questions.
Choosing to be on the minority chain is not less profitable than choosing to be on the majority. If you sell your majority coins, you will sell them for majority price. As a result, you will end up owning more minority coins than you had originally, though the US dollar value should be about the same.
Profit comes from knowing how the markets will move before they do (and performing arbitrage), not from owning the asset that has the greatest market cap.
----
Right now there are 3 implementations of Bitcoin in the wild, and each of the 3 will react differently to different network events. The network is essentially splitting apart, with each fragment driven by a different faction.
If you don't know what the different factions are, you probably don't need to. Its needlessly involved, highly political, and full of echo-chambers and shouting matches.
What happens largely depends on how much support each faction has. Unfortunately, there's no real way to measure how much support each faction has until the fork actually occurs. Each faction thinks that its the largest by a significant margin, and thinks that the other factions have used underhanded techniques to bolster their visible support.
When the rubber meets the pavement, we will know though. If the network splits into three pieces, likely the coin price for each piece will move around violently, and one portion of the network will probably end up with a much higher coin price than the other parts. Or maybe it'll be an even three-way split, which will make things in the Bitcoin world very confusing.
----
As a huge Bitcoin fan, I hate to say this, but if you aren't clued into the various events, and you can't name the three factions or explain the beliefs of each, you should just stay away for a while. If you get pulled into the split without knowing what's going on, you are very likely to lose money. There will certainly be opportunists trying to take advantage of the situation, and you, being ignorant of the situation, will be the one who gets taken advantage of.
----
If you do know what's going on, you can name the factions, etc, then what you should do is pretty simple. When the split happens, sell all of your coins on the forks that you disagree with, and use the resulting money to buy coins on your preferred fork.
----
For anyone who cares, my alignment is with the status quo. I feel great animosity towards the hardfork faction (confusingly called Segwit2x), precisely because they have forced a situation where people who don't know what's going on are able to get hurt. They have also repeatedly, repeatedly, ignored very sound advice from the technical experts of the industry.
The UASF faction (confusingly, a 'pro Segwit' and 'anti Segwit2x' faction) has my spiritual support, but I don't think they have the numbers behind them to make a difference. I don't think running the UASF software is the right move.
I personally believe that overwhelmingly, the vast majority of people who use Bitcoin are probably largely unaware of what is happening, and are running the status-quo software (confusingly, the 'Segwit' software, or the 'Bitcoin-core' software). I'm guessing when the forks all happen, it'll be pretty dominantly vanilla Bitcoin with the highest price, and then a few weeks later it'll all be a bad memory, and nothing will have happened at all.
I guess we'll find out.