Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st
Well, that's a remarkably uninformative announcement.  Here's an attempt at a neutral tl;dr from a Bitcoin amateur.Bitcoin is currently suffering from significant scaling problems, which lead to high transaction fees.  Numerous proposals to fix the scaling issue have been proposed, the two main camps being "increase the block size" and "muddle through by discarding less useful data" (aka Segregated Witness/SegWit).  However, any changes require consensus from the miners who create Bitcoins and process transactions, and because it's not in their best incentive to do anything to reduce those transaction fees, no change has received majority consensus.In an attempt to break this deadlock, there is a "Bitcoin Improvement Proposal #148" (BIP148) that proposes a User-Activated Soft Fork (UASF) taking effect on August 1, 2017. Basically, everybody who agrees to this proposal wants SegWit to happen and (here's the key part) commits to discarding all confirmations that do not flag support for SegWit from this date onward.  If successful, this will fork Bitcoin, because whether a transaction succeeded or not is going to depend on which side of the network you believe.However, BIP148's odds of success look low, as many of the largest miners out there led by Bitmain have stated that they will trigger a User-Activated Hard Fork (UAHF) if needed to stop it.  Specifically, if UASF appears successful, instead of complying with SegWit, they'll start mining BTC with large blocks instead: https://blog.bitmain.com/en/uahf-contingency-plan-uasf-bip14...Anyway, it all boils down to significant uncertainty, and unless you've got a dog in the race you'll probably want to refraining from making BTC transactions around the deadline or purchasing new BTC until the dust settles down.And an important disclaimer: this is an extremely contentious issue in the Bitcoin community and it's really difficult to find info that's not polarized one way or the other.  Most notably, Reddit's /r/bitcoin is rabidly pro-
BIP148 and /r/btc is equally rabidly against it.  Here's one reasonably neutral primer: 
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/bitcoin-beginners-guide...