I would like to tell you the story from my point of view and then decide if buying Bitcoin now it is a good idea. First of all, for Bitcoin to be able to handle the number of transactions other payment systems do needs to change and this is known since the creation of Bitcoin. From time to time some spam the Bitcoin network with transactions and this leads to two things, first to delay the verification of the transactions and second to increase the transaction fees in order for the transactions to be verified faster. The last spam (days ago) was the worst so far and it created the largest backlog of transactions. I had a transaction that took a week to be confirmed. There are some proposals on how Bitcoin can change and handle larger amount of transactions, the most common are SegWit by Bitcoin core and Bitcoin Unlimited mostly backed by miners. SegWit (Segregated Witness) is a soft fork which means it can handle “old style” transactions along with the new ones and Bitcoin continues normally. Bitcoin Unlimited is had fork which means that it is incompatible and will cause problems in the Bitcoin network. If that happens which is what Bitcoin miners want is to have two Bitcoin blockchains and by extension two coins. Exchange sites decided to keep the Bitcoin core as BTC (or XBT) and the new coin (if created) as BTU (or XBU).
Bitcoin price dropped due to this uncertainty but I went all in with Bitcoin. This is for two reasons, first of all, cheap Bitcoins. The second is, if the split happens, you will end up with both BTC and BTU, it is like duplicating your coins. Even if the price drops in the first days, which will happen since each side will dump the coins of the other side, you still have profit by doing nothing. The price of at least one of them will recover so the profit will be even more. This is why, in my opinion, is a good idea to buy Bitcoin now and this is what I did. I am in favor of Bitcoin (BTC) and that is the blockchain that I will support in any case. Bitcoin Unlimited have bugs and it is premature to force it at this point, recent bug took almost half of its BU nodes offline.
