Quote from: David Rabahy on March 17, 2017, 08:21:13 PM

I think, if it is even functionally possible, we might end up with three coins;

1) Bitcoin as it is running right now with no significant development team to love it at first
2) Bitcoin-SW as envisioned by the "Core" development team
3) Bitcoin-BU ...

Will you explain why you think 1 will happen? I am non-plussed

Quote from: David Rabahy on March 17, 2017, 08:21:13 PM

Maybe I should punt it all over to ETH (although I may have missed the majority of the run up already but at least maybe I could hold value there).

Ethereum is not a good crypto to my mind. PoS is just not viable incentive wise, and the overall design of Ethereum is flawed in many other ways.

Quote from: David Rabahy on March 17, 2017, 08:21:13 PM

Otherwise maybe I should just take my profits back to the fiat world (yuk).

I wouldn't recommend that, cryptocurrency is too significant an innovation to abandon outright. Keep some small amount of whatever makes you feel most comfortable, or better yet, do as you're doing and continue to learn through reading and asking questions, anyone can become more confident in what to invest in with enough study.

Quote from: David Rabahy on March 17, 2017, 08:21:13 PM

One thing I know for sure; I will continue to run my own full node (which variant I need to think about). If SW does indeed soft fork then I will need to remain vigilant and either move my non-SW-UXTO to SW-UXTO (it's too early for that, right?) or move it to the -BU coin (how is that done or am I confused?). I don't want to lose my investment. All this debating/fighting is undermining my confidence.

You don't need to do anything, that's the safest option. As Angry Dwarf says, you can hedge with very simple set of steps, bear in mind you'll need double the hard disk space to run that configuration (for both the BTC chain and the BTU chain)

A recent announcement by 12 or so major exchanges has taken alot of the uncertainty out of a potential BU hard fork.

They have agreed between them to refuse to list BTU if the BU development team don't change their code to prevent replay attacks. This is highly disruptive attack, enabled by unwillingness to alter BU sufficiently from Bitcoin that the attack is impossible. The attack allows the malicious party to -

monitor the 2 blockchains
copy transactions from one of either forked chain (which are of course free for all to see)
send the same transaction on the chain the original was not sent on

All the attacker gains is annoying those who get attacked, they can't steal for themselves. They're just moving the coins against your will, simply because they have everything they need (a signed transaction) to playback the same transaction on the other blockchain. But if you were sending the money to an address not in your node's wallet (an exchange address being the obvious example), there is a risk that you wouldn't be able to get your coins either. So it's pretty damn serious overall.

Because of this statement from the (major) exchanges, BU now basically have no choice but to fix the attack vector, as the exchanges couldn't list BTU in good conscience knowing the serious losses or uncertainty this could otherwise have caused. So they've done us all a favour, and the ball is in BU's court. I expect they'll fix it.