An economic majority can push hashrate over eventually. Miners can only mine for so long while loosing money on a chain that's worth way less. I don't think UASF will actually succeed, but an economic majority could definitely render the hashrate before the split irrelevant after a month or two.
Correct. I don't think an UAHF coin will be worth more than $500 if it's only supported by miners and a few small companies. But I got the impression that BitPay is willing to support everything that is better than the status quo - except UASF BIP 148. So Bitmain's UAHF may get support from BitPay if UASF "succeeds" - and then they have already one of the biggest economic actors on board.
BitPay must be one of the actors that are most suffering the high fees, so their stance is understandable without any conspiracy theories. They are among the most fervent supporters of Segwit2x.
Note - if BIP 148 succeeds and the minority chain still exists, a large amount of the hashrate on there would probably be supporting BU, so couldn't they just hard fork on the legacy chain? Is that not possible for some reason?
As far as I know, BU blocks would be accepted by the Bitmain UAHF, so they probably would stay on the same (forked) chain. If there is (BIP148) UASF but no UAHF, then I think there would be nothing - at least nothing technical - to impede a BU fork.
There is no such thing as an "economic majority". 95% of Bitcoin users don't care or are uneducated when it comes to the scaling debate. A handful of CEO's saying they support this or they support that, is nothing more than political gerrymandering that literally means nothing, unless they personally own large chunks of hashpower, That is.
I agree with respect to the "apolitical majority". But we have two major players that could influence this majority:
- the Core client, which is the most used;
- BitPay, which is the only significant payment processor.
If Core decided to integrate BIP148 into the code (it's possible if things escalate further) then they will have some users that simply download "the latest Bitcoin version" (not knowing that it's not fully compatible to the legacy chain). That should not be ignored. However, because of BitPay's influence I think the "economically winning" chain will be the one BitPay chooses.