Quote from: blunderer on February 09, 2016, 12:13:45 AM

At this point, I'm interested in how the Bitcoin protocol can differentiate between "real" (money-backed) and "unreal" (unbacked by anything other than crunch power) non-mining nodes.
The answer is "IT FUCKING CAN NOT."

This question has already been answered. The protocol cannot assign value to these tokens. Just like with Gold, Commodities, Fiat... value is assigned by human agents or AI in the future. This means that 1 person can fork off of the network, have almost no hashing power and his/her coins can be extremely valuable as long as they and another believe it is real money and has value.

This is very basic economics that applies to any assets, that seems to escape you.

Quote from: blunderer on February 09, 2016, 12:13:45 AM

"... They vote with their CPU power, expressing their acceptance of valid blocks by working on extending them and rejecting invalid blocks by refusing to work on them. Any needed rules and incentives can be enforced with this consensus mechanism."

At the time when Satoshi wrote that, CPU power was synonymous with Full nodes. This distinction has changed over the years. Now there are differences in the vote and influences of a full node and mining full node.

Quote from: Cconvert2G36 on February 09, 2016, 12:23:26 AM

So, unstable people are threatening to dump their coins and/or spam the mempool to get their way... therefore, we should do exactly what they want...

How about... no.

I agree , and all/most of core agrees with you here, that is why we are pushing for changes to increase capacity with Segwit.

Quote from: BlindMayorBitcorn on February 09, 2016, 12:18:30 AM

Estimates have Classic at 16% of full nodes. This is madness. What will happen to Blockstream's alliances/sidechains under Classic? Any change in business strategy? Are we all doomed?

I count 8.89% of all nodes now... where are you getting your data?