Bitcoin fork is important but also a red herring.

Red herrings only matter if people pay attention to them. In the case of the bitcoin fork, this red herring matters because it psychologically affects people. I will say the declines began well before this bitcoin split story was big. In fact, Segwit2x was one of the reasons the market rallied some time ago.

During every bear market (or bull market), the media cycle creates a narrative. At least half the time, this narrative is only mildly correct. Often, I have seen the narrative to be totally false, both in the world of stocks and in cryptos.

This is one of the rules I value greatly in the investing world, that the news can harm your perspective as much as it can help it. There are expert chart people who wont even look at news, they just look at charts (usually traders). This does not work for fundamental investing, but from them we can realize there are other mechanics besides news events which affect price. If a coin goes up 20%, the media cycle may try to assign a story to it, but what if the real story was, some millionaire entered a buy order wrong? It happens, but this is never the story because the media cycle would usually not be privy to that info. Then they might create a news event and narrative about an increase. In the case of the bitcoin split, there is some truth to it, so I will cover this issue.

Segwit2X is an old story, the split is an old story. It was a decision reached in late May: https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/bitcoin-scaling-agreement-officially-met-segwit-2mb-hard-fork/

When this info was leaked on twitter that an agreement had been reached, Bitcoin soared. This is one of the primary reasons the market went so high in the first place.

Now that this agreement is being enacted, it has become a focal point for FUD (fear-uncertainty-doubt). There is a risk that people will lose coins due to this fork... ect. ect. Most of this speculation about what could go wrong is all put into one very simple basket of probability:

• Are the miners & nodes & developers of bitcoin so totally incompetent that they can't continue to keep their network operational?

If this were just on bitcoin core team, I would suggest they are this incompetent. They are the people who have failed to lead the users into a system wide upgrade for 2+ years, and have been the cause of high transaction fees. However, this agreement of Segwit2x was not authored by them. It was not their plan. It was a compromise reached by miners and other end users in the community.

Imagine if it all went horribly wrong come August 1st... have you ever heard of a hot patch? They just issue a quick fix for the bug, and maybe the network is down for a couple hours. I do not think this would or could happen, but even if it did, woopidy-do! It is better than the Greek banking system which shuts out depositors from their funds for months or years.

My point here is, the market is declining and everyone needed something to focus on, and this was it. Now that everyone is focused on it, it becomes a market important event. When in fact, it should have almost no importance at all for people holding diversified positions. "Chance of total network failure and the loss of bitcoin forever and ever..." it makes a great news article on a website and creates juicy reddit discussions, but in the world of probabilities and factoring in risk, I do not even consider it.

In terms of probability, you would rather consider the case of Ethereum, where a coin fork caused people to make tons of money as both subsequent coins went up higher.

My concern is the August 1st upgrade and/or fork which ensues, creates a nice rally off of a bottom. Hopefully it will, yet is that the end of the market declines?

If you can follow what I am saying here, what is supposedly crashing the market today, is the very same story that caused it to rally to 100 bil+ market cap. In my viewpoint, the bigger story here is buying and selling, psychology and movements of money. And the Segwit2x is the backdrop for the actual story. When the Segwit2x finalizes, it was not the actual story, but just a backdrop to it. The real story is not something I am fully privileged to. The only people who are run the exchanges and keep that a secret.

It could be the end of the July we see a bottom. Yet it could also be that after that rally we dip to new lows as the real story continues. This story is not so hard to guess:

When a market expands from less than 20 bil, to 115 bil in a couple months, creating gains for people in the range of +400%, it lets off steam by tanking in a few months. People sitting on hundred percent gains are very quick to sell because they are sitting in good profit and what is there to lose by selling? Then, whatever negative event exists during this period becomes the central point of focus.

For a decent bottom to happen, people need to see crypto as a value buying proposition, rather than a hot air balloon about to be popped.