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.
Economics have absolutely nothing to do with nodes, since non-mining nodes *DO NOT REPRESENT BTC OR HASHPOWER*. They are IRRELEVANT.
Stop turning what was intended as nothing more than "trustless" wallet, of use to no one but the guy running it (to protect *his* BTC), into some mystified majical security measure. It's not. It's a friken wallet. No majix, no meestyry.
"... 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.
Unless you can describe *how* these nodes "vote and influence" (and how they're differentiated from "fake" nodes by the network), I'm gonna assume magical thinking on your part.
Which is cool, but not here. Not now.