The time is fast approaching when a major change in the Bitcoin network may be occurring. What has happened is that due to bitcoins increasing popularity the number of transactions has increased substantially. The so far anonymous creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, limited the transaction block size to 1 mb.
A block is simply a group of transactions that need to be verified by the miners over the Bitcoin network before they can be added as legit on the public ledger. This size limitation needs to be rectified and one way to do this is to make a change to the Bitcoin protocol. More simply this would create two new blockchains, one which handles the larger transaction size and the other in the current 1 mb size.
This "forking" of BTC isn't without risk and there is anxiety in the larger community. This anxiety partially explains the recent drop in the price of bitcoin as people begin hedging their bets by buying so-called alt-coins (Ethereum, Dash, Litecoin, etc). A list of the marketcaps of the various crypto-currencies can be found here: https://coinmarketcap.com
If you do hold any bitcoin and wish to prepare for any adverse consequences with this potential "hard" fork I would recommend reviewing this
article: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/beginners-guide-surviving-coin-split/
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