2. Even if UASF is supported by the community, if LN isn't ready I'm afraid from a practical point of view users will turn to a BU fork because of lower transaction costs even if they themselves think BU is a shit long term scaling solution. If you needed to send a $10 payment and had some money on an exchange, wouldn't you buy the BU coins with your BTC and initiate a $0 fee transfer instead of paying $5 in fees?
Segwit in itself provides a capacity increase that will, in theory, decrease transaction fees like the BU fork would, in theory. It does not exist to just enable LN but is itself a way to increase the number of transactions that can fit in a block.
3. If LN isn't instantly deployable how long will it take to be deployed? Will sites like exchanges which create an enormous amount of on chain transfers be able to instantly reduce their transfer load through LN and if so by how much?
LN is still being worked on but it is available on testnet, so it certainly is close to being deployed. I don't think it is instantly deployable though. I don't think it would be particularly useful for exchanges as LN is (so far) only useful for small, recurring payments. Most exchanges don't perform on chain transactions except when their customers are depositing or withdrawing money. The exchanging itself is all internal database records.
4. A continuation of question 3, in terms of development time and effort what cost will merchants pay to switch to using LN? I'm not saying what it will take them to recognize non-segwit transactions on the segwit chain, I know that is trivial. I am asking how long will it take and how tedious will it be for them and their users to start benefiting from lower transaction costs.
Given that there will be software available that can be used by other customers and merchants, it shouldn't really be that much effort to switch to using LN. The most work will be from setting up payment channels, but in most scenarios, the merchant would only be receiving money, not sending, so they risk almost no money. The only issue there is that they would not be able to access the money until after the channel is closed.
5. If we agree that the ASICBOOST miners have acted Machiavellian up to this point, why exactly would we ever expect them to honor any agreement where they would sacrifice their profitability? If they lose the ability to exploit ASICBOOST, that means they could go from being high profit miners to being losers in the mining space no matter what price bitcoin reached. If they no longer have a competitive advantage against other miners, they will lose money regardless of the BTC price. With this in mind how is a malicious attack on BIP148 different from their secretive ASICBOOST exploitation and the faux politics of certain miners? Why would they possibly not attack the BIP148 chain if what they have done so far is actually worse? A long chain reorg that causes user losses would be worse but an above board attack where BIP148 users are not given a false sense of security would not be worse, it would just be a continuation of disruption.
Not using ASICBOOST is still profitable. Just because ASICBOOST miners stop using ASICBOOST does not mean that they will suddenly be mining at a loss. It just means that their profits will decrease.
8. LTC already has working Segwit but doesn't afaik have LN set up on it. Why is this? When will LN be deployable on LTC?
Because all LN development has been for Bitcoin. While Bitcoin and litecoin are similar, there is still a non-trivial amount of work to do to make LN work on Litecoin. Fron what I understand, those working on LN will finish it for Bitcoin first (except for segwit) and then port it over to Litecoin once the Bitcoin version is completed.
9. How could a post-UASF chain ever truly know within a reasonable time period that there will not be a reorganization? If we assume that there isn't any decrease in the ASICBOOST hashing power and that a large amount of malicious miners have not been dormant in anticipation and or are not just coming online can we be confident in the BIP148 chain? Are those reasonable assumptions to make?
A BIP148 chain cannot be reorged with a non-BIP 148 chain. This is because it is a restriction of the current consensus rules so BIP 148 nodes considers the non-BIP 148 chain to be invalid. However the non-BIP 148 chain can be reorged with the BIP 148 chain since non-BIP 148 nodes still consider the BIP 148 chain to be valid.
10. To end off on a note of more personal politics, I think both Core and BU have a terrible actor or two. Ver is obviously not honest and Theymos who I am aware doesn't work for Blockstream could have done a much better job at constructively moderating /r/bitcoin.
Theymos is not involved with Core at all. He has never contributed to Bitcoin Core and does not participate in its development whatsoever.
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