BIP148 supporters claim because it is allegedly a soft-fork, it does not need protection against transaction replay or being wiped out.

However, the facts are that BIP148 is not a safe soft-fork.

Its characteristics are more like a hard-fork, because it does not take any steps to ensure it is supported by what Satoshi called the "honest miners", which are assumed to be in majority. Others have called them "rational" or "intelligently profit-seeking". No matter what you want to call them, in Bitcoin, the majority of hashpower decides the rules that make up the longest valid chain. If you disagree, you can create a minority fork which splits off cleanly in a hard fork. But UASF does not do this - it attempts to do it via what is proclaims to be a soft-fork, without any of the necessary protection that a minority fork of any kind would require:

• ensure in the code that it activates at a minimum support threshold established through consultation with miners (even if they are a dissident minority group - they still have to defend your coin against attacks by majority hashpower)

• replay protection. Without it, the minority fork surrenders the freedom of pre-fork holders to transact separately on it, since purchases of pre-fork coins could be replayed to the majority chain. Effectively, someone who would sell their minority UASFcoins could lose their more valuable majority chain bitcoins in the process. Some people will not realize this, and get scammed. Replay protection can alleviate that risk to some extent. The best protection is to separate your pre-coins on the different chains.

• protection against re-organisation by a majority hashpower chain. UASF proponents claim this does not apply "because they are a soft-fork", but this is not true. As long as their chain is supported only by a small minority of hashpower, the majority can re-organize their chain - as long as the minority does not change proof of work to eliminate the threat of the majority hashpower. But UASF does not do even this.

I would urge everyone to prepare for UASF. Like its supporters said, it is likely to happen. It is likely to create a lot of loss for people who unwittingly follow it - whether they be individuals or businesses. To avoid those painful lessons, keep in mind that the current POW is what gives Bitcoin its security advantage over other coins, and that bitcoins to which you don't exclusively hold the private keys are not really under your control.

I urge you to contact your exchanges, payment processors, wallet providers, and other Bitcoin-accepting vendors, and demand that they inform themselves of the risks of UASF and that if they support it, they at least continue to support access to the majority chain as well. If they don't provide you this option, it would be better to take your money to where it is safe.