If you had your in a hard wallet on August 1st you got nothing. If you had it in the secure safe online wallet I’ve been in since early 2013, you got free bitcoin cash equal to how many btc you had on August 1st. If you had as many coins as I do on that date that added up, with today’s bch price, to a massive sum. But even if you had only a little, still at today’s btc to bch price ration of about 6:1 or 5:1 you got a lot of valuable free currency.
Btc did dip briefly yesterday but even so by only a couple thousand dollars hardly a crash and already it’s back to pushing 18k. And during the time of that dip bch rose so much that the value of my wallet actually increased over all. Now that bch has come back down some but btc has gone back up my wallet’s value has stabilized at around this over all increased value.
So before you listen to anyone advocating keeping your funds only in a hard wallet consider that other forks might occur in the future giving you other bitcoin related currencies, or perhaps forks of one of the alt currencies some of you might hold, giving some other new currency, for free.
As far as safety it’s more about picking the right online wallet than blindly just keeping it in a hard wallet. There are also sometimes transfer costs if you must transfer your coins out of your hard wallet every time you wish to trade them, for those of you who trade. Not to mention that if you’re going to trade them in a time of volatility you might not even be able to get them into the wallet where all this volatility is happening in time. I keep only a little in coin base compared to what I have in my main wallet but if I’d wanted to trade that bitcoin cash pop that happened yesterday I’d have had to had my trading currency ready to go in coinbase yesterday.