Could anyone please explain to me how this fork will work?
Examples would be greatly appreciated. The way I'm understanding is, if I have 1 BTC on Coinbase, they will match it. So after the fork I will have my 1 BTC and 1 B2X (Bitcoin 2x). Let's just say I sold my 1 BTC, will I still have my 1 B2X to sell? Does this mean free money?
No, it doesn't mean free money.
When a cryptocurrency forks into 2 separate cryptocurrencies, then the market sets the value for each.
Much of the value of Bitcoin is based on several things, such as the existing base of businesses that accept it, the efficacy and reliability of the developers maintaining it, and the familiarity by people that use it.
After a fork, that value becomes reduced, as many users or businesses pick one or the other to use.
New value may be created by new functionality added by the changes that caused the fork, or overall value (ie the sum of both forks) may become reduced due to a loss of trust in the system.
A more reasonable expectation is probably that the overall value, between both forks, is roughly the same as before the fork, but becomes split between two.
However, given the speculative nature of a sizeable proportion of the market, any small change may trigger large market movements, so it's anyone's guess as to what will actually happen.
After the fork, if you sell your BTC, then yes you will still have your B2X to sell (assuming that the wallet service you're using gives you access to it, or that you run your own wallet).
Yes. Hard fork with common history does mean free cryptocurrency in your wallet (or your exchange account, if the exchange supports both the original and the new cryptocurrency).
Common sense will tell us that the fiat value of one cryptocurrency after the fork should fall in proportion to the gain in the other, but this is not what was observed during Bitcoin Cash fork. One day after the fork BCH (Bitcoin Cash) was worth about 400 USD, while BTC (Bitcoin) has risen in price.
The number of coins technically doubles, but you are holding coins backed by different blockchain and miners
In an irrational market, the price of the forked coins can trade higher than what you may think as seen from https://www.coingecko.com/en/price_charts/bitcoin-cash/usd and https://www.coingecko.com/en/price_charts/bitcoin-gold/usd
