Many people are running pre-SegWit nodes but that's irrelevant because they are showing support for BTC rather than BTU, regardless of whether they support SegWit. 

More hash rate is signalled to support BU, but it's clear that nearly no one actually trusts BU with their nodes, especially when giant bugs are being uncovered every day.  If miners had actually been running BU when these giant bugs were uncovered there would have been a lot of problems.  BU is not competent enough to run Bitcoin and the nodes show this rather than just the hash rate provided by mining monopolies like Antpool.

It's fair enough to ask people to do a quick favour, not everything has to earn you money.

But this survey is pretty inconvenient for me because the questions are very vague, like "what platforms do you use?".  It needs to be a lot clearer.

Also, in future don't spam your links with a poll, just click on "new topic" on the top right.

You need to go and download the latest version of Bitcoin Core from their website.

You'll also need to read their Requirements and Warnings page, which says, among other things, that you should have over 125GB of disk space, that some antiviruses might quarantine parts of the blockchain making it harder to run and that some internet providers might charge you for the extra bandwidth.  Make sure you're prepared.

EDIT:  I see that Digitalocean is a cloud computing service, so some of the notes about your internet will not matter.

Actually, Coinbase didn't sign the statement and seemed to think that it was too pro-Core so their position is a bit less clear.

I suppose if it's treated as an alt on most exchanges though, maybe if you were holding Bitcoin on exchanges they would just still be represented as BTC and they would probably rob you of the BTU that they would receive.

Online wallets aren't quite like exchanges though because they recognise that you're trying to hold Bitcoin, which could be expressed as BTC or BTU or both, whereas exchanges will view it more like you chose to hold BTC so that's what you will keep.

I hope that some reputable services like Blockchain will allow the users both of their coins.

A lot of people on the forum are pretty optimistic about Bitcoin's prospects.  There's always the possibility of a HF but we know that Bitcoin is always volatile and that it'll go up again.  The panic selling from some people is an opportunity for people who are prepared.

I think that a lot of whales are buying as well, because I'm not sure how many more knowledgeable people actually believe that the fork is going to happen or that if it did happen, Bitcoin would fail too badly.

BitFinex is trading imaginary BU coins, but since they don't actually exist yet it's just a kind of promise for when they actually get the coins.  It's really not worth doing and then holding it in an exchange, especially when it might not ever even happen at all.  They started it at the rate of 1 BU coin for 0.35 Bitcoin though if you really want to do it.

If he really wanted to help, he would talk to Core about a compromise involving the continuation of Bitcoin as BTC but with changes to Core's code.  I don't think that Core have handled this very well.

Bitcoin might well not get a hard fork, but I think that the OP's post isn't particularly reasonable.  The claim that it "stole" $300 from Bitcoin is particularly strange - Bitcoin's price going down is not bad for everyone and for someone to sell someone else has to buy, knowing that the value will go up in the long term.  For some groups it's very positive, such as day traders who profit from the volatility.

This seems to be an attack on hard forks in general rather than Bitcoin Unlimited - Bitcoin Unlimited is bad because it's wrought with bugs, increasing the block size won't be good for everything and because the split of value between regular Bitcoin and a BU coin will be very strange and volatile.  But you don't mention this at all - you could equally call any other hard fork a theft of its original form.

Web wallets are different in that they essentially store your Bitcoin for you rather than allowing you to store your own Bitcoin.  Trying to simplify Bitcoin's experience can result in a lot of choices having to be made by the provider.  For example, Coinbase stopped ETC support and prevented withdrawals, essentially taking the hard forked part of Ethereum away from their users.

So, in the event of a hard fork, how would wallet providers handle this and display their users' holdings?

I actually don't think you're trying to scam people, but you should know that if anyone gives you money they will get scammed.

There are literally thousands of services pretending to offer these very high returns, but I think you have some reason for thinking they'll actually pay - maybe you're in financial trouble or you're just naive or something.  All of them are scams, especially if you put in an amount as high as that.

If someone wanted to get scammed, they could just find one of these scams themselves and lose their money to it - it's not hard, they're everywhere and there are so many stupid sites that sites can do it ironically and still get thousands of dollars in Bitcoin.  It's hardly a service to know one of these sites.

That just makes absolutely no sense.  There's no real or accurate way that people would use chips in their body for payment, or reason that that would happen and you're presenting this as if it's fact.  You even claim that cash will disappear when cash is and will continue to be a useful means of payment.
By being useful in day to day life - helpful because it's decentralised so if people were concerned that their credit cards, which they would most likely still use weren't protecting their privacy they would use Bitcoin (and especially so if they wanted their currency to deflate).
It is a second currency.  A government doesn't have to say that Bitcoin is a currency for it to be a currency.
Other cryptocurrencies will either be still just used for meaningless trading, or if Bitcoin turns out not to be scalable, there might be cryptocurrencies for different specific purposes (or cryptocurrencies might cease to be used).

Yeah it's all about your area unfortunately, if you live in an urban area you could go for LocalBitcoins which is a pretty trusted site for exchanging with cash (and PayPal etc sometimes, but be careful with that because scams are always possible and it's P2P).  If you don't, the first thing I would do is exchange with someone on the forum for PayPal (they might know your name but it's very unlikely they'll use the information), but if you use PayPal you need to choose a really good person because PayPal transactions are reversible and everyone will think you're trying to scam them.

A few credit card sites don't need your name, namely CoinMama for small amounts (under $150) and if you live in an urban area you could use a Bitcoin ATM, but them having your credit card details could make me pretty insecure as well.

I would avoid signing up to BTCery because cloud mining is seldom profitable and the chance that it's a Ponzi scheme is always going to be pretty high.

The only cloud mining service which definitely isn't a scam is HashNest because they're run by Bitmain.  I'm sure that there are several others but the vast majority are either blatant scams or have clever dirty tricks to avoid paying certain people.  Even HashNest probably isn't a good investment - cloud mining seldom could be.

Don't conflate pool mining with cloud mining.  By all means buy your own equipment and join a pool.  Even if they have cheaper running costs than you, you'll be a lot safer and probably earn more profit than cloud mining.  If you have expensive electricity or other major setbacks, it might even be a good idea to steer clear of mining altogether.

Oh come on, one Ponzi scheme can't pump the Bitcoin price.  Did it even occur to you that people are going to put their Bitcoin into the scheme when the price is as high as possible?  The scheme claims to have its own payment system I think (it's pretty hard to understand), but if true it'll mean that when putting Bitcoin in it'll be converted to something else, so in the same way that people want to sell their Bitcoin when the price is as high as possible, they'll put it into that Ponzi scheme when the price is high as well.

The two things are a correlation, not a causation.  Big difference.

No one will ever want to pay tax on digital currency assets.  I doubt that governments can't find every single person that owns Bitcoin and make them pay tax on it.

The good thing is that Coinbase is actually pretty much irrelevant.  They're getting one specific online wallet provider to give details about their users, so anyone who actually owns Bitcoin instead of holding it online shouldn't have any trouble.  Hopefully if Coinbase fail it'll give users an incentive to download a software wallet like Electrum or even a full node instead of paying the tax.

It's a much quicker and better way of sending transactions, so if you believe that BU is a better way of sending transactions can't we just treat that as a "voluntary side service" and use the original coin instead?  There's no legitimate situation in which people would just rather have a worse transaction for the sake of it.

Yes, some sites (and users) have been mentioned above.  But it's a terrible idea because PayPal is reversible.  The people giving you Bitcoin for it will never trust you to leave the transaction after you've received your Bitcoin because Bitcoin is non-reversible.  Because of that, sites will charge large fees out of fear of scammers and, for any significant amount, will require loads of ID to make sure you're legit.

You should try a better way - go on an exchange, or earn the Bitcoin itself, or transfer for cash on LocalBitcoins.  Hell, even a Bitcoin ATM is a better idea than PayPal.

The number of BU nodes has never been significant and obviously it's the hash rate that counts to whether it actually happens.

The number of BU blocks in the past week is still 37.6% to SegWit's 26.6%.

I think that the nodes do represent the users (not completely accurately but to some extent), and it shows how BU is monopolised by Bitmain and other major Chinese companies rather than the vast majority of users (and nodes).  I say let the HF happen so that the BU coin can die from user usage and Jihan Wu comes crawling back to Core.

No one actually argued for socialism - clearly the comparison was between America and European countries, and that broadly, Europe's brand of capitalism results in less extreme wealth inequality.

Notably, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos did not provide a service.  Their employees did, and yet their employees did not receive the appropriate value of the labour that they did - hence why some people become so rich, surplus labour value.  Just like how owning a machine does not mean that you made the cloth from it - it was done by a mixture of the workers and the machines, but people who own this property feel that they have a right to more than an amount of money proportionate to the amount of work they did.

Even in European countries this is a problem, but without socialism which is often economically flawed there are no viable solutions, so all America can do is adopt the slightly less right wing systems of countries like Sweden and Norway, which have very high standards of living and economies, as well as being havens for social progression in my opinion.

Obviously you now know that this is a Ponzi scheme - so here's what that entails.

-Any returns you make will at least partially be made up of similar naive investors who put in some money and lost it.  You're therefore supporting the scheme and indirectly defrauding other investors.  Because of that, you should withdraw all funds from the scheme, if you can, immediately - along with the principal.

-If you can't withdraw your funds from the scheme, you should think about yourself and how long the scheme will pay out for.  I searched for the scheme and I think it's only been operating for about a week and paying out for now.  This means that you might be lucky and make an ROI from it, but do not advertise the scheme to anyone else.

All of those pools are pretty bad.  They all take far more fees than necessary to run the pool or to keep the workers comfortable.  AntPool and BTCC are the worst as they take transaction fees, which are currently quite high meaning that their actual fees are in the region of 10%, far more than you should be paying for a basic service.

The problem with pools is that they can often be owned by companies which own large monopolies on Bitcoin mining, such as Bitmain's ownership of Antpool.  You should ideally go to a small-ish pool - realistically, you can't expect to get ROI too quickly anyway and when you do it'll be pretty minor with just a small amount of machines, so you just need a pool which has low fees even if you don't mine blocks too often.

You could try the Comparison of mining pools on the Bitcoin Wiki if you want help with details.