Non-mining-related nodes don't matter.   Transactions will reach mining nodes/pools.  Non-mining nodes are only interesting for its owner, to see the block chain for himself, and verify its validity without having to trust another full node.  But full nodes that do not relate to mining don't matter in the consensus mechanism.

What does matter, are users.  They 'vote with their money' and determine market cap.

You are seriously confused about this aspect.  There is no "majority hash rate consensus" between INCOMPATIBLE CHAINS.  The only thing you do with your 51% hash rate is to produce INVALID BLOCKS wrt the original protocol.  So this PoW doesn't matter, the blocks are invalid.  If you produce 1.5 MB blocks with a PoW that is more than 10 times all the PoW that ever went into bitcoin, then these blocks doesn't count because they are simply INVALID.  The old protocol simply rejects them (in the same way as if they were containing wrong signatures in the transactions).  The only valid blocks (wrt the old protocol) are those, mined with the 49% hash rate of the miners sticking to the old protocol.

But the new protocol can continue building on its own chain with bigger blocks.  

Of course, as long as BU accepts also old-protocol blocks, they need 51% of the hash rate, or the old chain (which is VALID under the new BU protocol if they don't protect themselves) will take over.  In fact, in this case, you can see the old protocol as a soft fork from the BU protocol, which can IMPOSE its will when it is majority.  In order to avoid that, BU should make the old protocol invalid too, so that ONLY BU blocks are compatible with BU.  Maybe they could flip a little-endian/big-endian convention somewhere, so that both are fully incompatible.  Otherwise, they risk at any moment to be killed by the "soft fork" of the old protocol.

Yes, you are right (see the edit of my previous post).  This "backward compatibility" of BU with respect to the standard protocol makes that the standard protocol is a soft fork of BU.  Then they expose themselves AT ANY MOMENT to be orphaned, even 6 months later, if ever the BU fork falls beneat 51% hash rate.  Then you will get the bitcoin chain orphaned 6 months behind, because from the first >1MB onwards, the soft fork is not compatible any more, and this will be the last valid block on the chain.  Major clusterfuck !

The only safe way of making the BU hard fork, is by making it incompatible with the old protocol.  If they don't do this, and they "pull the trigger", this will be a major disaster on the chain.

The only safe way of making the BU hard consensus, is by high majority  If they don't do this, and they "pull the trigger", this will be a major disaster on the chain. with orphans. which eventually settles down to a single chain
leading to the minority either:
not syncing and just orphaning everything (dead in the water)
having to change their own protocol to match(re-joining the consensus community)
intentionally banning away from the majority to not see the higher blockheight and orphans to then build ontop of their MINORITY

Well, then you ALSO create an (incompatible) alt coin.  That's what a hard fork is: to create an alt coin. 

in short
soft=pools only
hard= NODES then pools
save repeating myself:

He is mistaken, but for different reasons. BU is a unilateral split. If, after BU pulls the trigger on their hard fork, the Core chain ever overtakes the BU chain, all BU coins will be permanently destroyed and all transactions involving them will be forever invalid. Mass panic will ensue and their altcoin will be worthless. That's why Core devs are begging BU to make their fork bilateral, but they won't listen (or they pretend not to listen because they don't have the competence to implement a bilateral fork).

Do tell me what happens when a BU blocked (not just signaling) is mined with e.g. 1.5 MB block size.

2017-01-29 06:59:12 Requesting block 000000000000000000cf208f521de0424677f7a87f2f278a1042f38d159565f5
2017-01-29 06:59:15 ERROR: AcceptBlock: bad-blk-length, size limits failed (code 16)

Yes it does cause a split. You are mistaken.

Of course, to get the altcoin away from Bitcoin.

Nonsense.

Then tell the BU folk to stop trying to harm Bitcoin.

What you are describing is what I and others call a bilateral hardfork-- where both sides reject the other.

I tried to convince the authors of BIP101 to make their proposal bilateral ... Sadly, the proposals authors were aggressively against this.

The ethereum hardfork was bilateral, probably the only thing they did right--

Sure. Only if you stop taking money from your employer.

What you are describing is what I and others call a bilateral hardfork-- where both sides reject the other.

I tried to convince the authors of BIP101 to make their proposal bilateral ... Sadly, the proposals authors were aggressively against this.

The ethereum hardfork was bilateral, probably the only thing they did right--

But if it does get approved, can we expect the price to go up as it would be a big step forward for bitcoin as even people without any knowledge would be able to trade it ? Right now, thats the only problem that seems for it to be widespread.

not part of standard ETF terms. but the specific companies terms/side services

usually what happens is that you buy out a whole "basket" to remove the collateral of the trust to then get delivered.
or the ETF shares are sold, and then real BTC are bought (behind the scenes) via a side subsidiary service that delivers.

but thats just things the COMPANY may have policy/services behind the scenes

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but in short.
lets say an ETF spikes to $2000
but real btc exchanges are still $1200

why would anyone buy say 20,000 shares (20 share=1btc equiv), costing $2mill(1000btc equiv).. to use the ETF subsiduary to withdraw that btc and reduce the ETF's collateral or be sold and converted behind the scenes to 'deliver' 1000btc.

where as the investor could sell the 20,000 and then take his $2m to a proper bitcoin exchange. and then buy 1666btc.. instead of 'get delivered' 1000btc

This is why we love Bitcoin, because there is not a barrier to entry for the poor. You do not have to belong to the "Rich boy Club" to be able to trade in Bitcoin. The average Joe on the street can signup at an Bitcoin exchange and buy $10 worth of bitcoin and nobody will stop him or her from trading.

The ETF is a safe gateway to protect the rich from the volatility of Bitcoin investments.

Are you sure?

Gold ETFs allow physical delivery if you own enough.  

Bitcoin already has a sigops per block limit to mitigate the risk of this attack (despite the FUD that introducing such a limit is all that's needed to solve the problem, which is pretty dumb considering that's already what happens )

Core would not because they're all convinced we must have segwit before increasing the block size to prevent a quadratic scaling sigop DDoS happening... though segwit doesn't change the sigops included in regular transactions, it only makes segwit transactions scale linearly

ETF is separate to bitcoin.
ETF investors are buying shares of a companies 'stock' (collateral holding/product), not actual bitcoins(investors cannot ask for a privkey or withdraw btc from ETF).

there are many companies offering ETF's (the winklvoss twins being one of them)

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yea the companies share prices can sky rocket. whereby investors realise that the companies 'collateral holding' is less than the companies speculative sky rocket price.

and thus COULD cause investors to then go and buy real bitcoins elsewhere (thus then affecting the real bitcoin price when they by on real bitcoin exchanges)

but thats all speculation

Right now segwit is slowly losing importance and not completely dead. Bitcoin unlimited gaining strength, so anything could happen in the short. I expect the price concern is the big factor which now people hope is the etf

I'm a little bit confused about this topic, In my own understanding Segwit is not good to all Bitcoin enthusiast in this industry. Because the number one will  get affect on this matter was the bitcoin community right? or the people who did mine bitcoin using mining rigs is that right? just correct me if I'm wrong,.

Bitcoin is good, and it's going good, don't take the current bitcoin price so unstable because the price should change but maybe $100 for few days is a lot.

Core can not stop community/miner consensus.

Let me see a viable BIP + code first, then we can talk about that.

BIP9 changed to a new quorum sensing approach that is MUCH less vulnerable to false triggering, so 95% under it is more like 99.9% (C) under the old approach.  basically when it activates, the 95% will have to be willing to potentially orphan the blocks of the 5% that remain(B)
If there is some reason when the users of Bitcoin would rather have it activate at 90%  ... then even with the 95% rule the network could choose to activate it at 90% just by orphaning the blocks of the non-supporters until 95%+ of the remaining blocks signaled activation.(A)

You are making a huge assumption that Bitcoin's store-of-value does not depend on its utility to be digital cash in widespread use.  

I believe the opposite to be true:  Without having widespread use (assumes more than 3 TPS)
Bitcoin will lose market share to other cryptocurrencies for all purposes,
both as a currency and commodity-like store of value.

I can't pick and choose individual features so would have to decide on overall features. Think I might have read core 0.14 saves mempool data between restarts which is probably a very good idea.

Could I install both, and either fire one version up or the other over the same blockchain/wallet directory structure though? Or could that very well change before any consensus is achieved?