Bitcoin Unlimited? What Is It?

I noticed yesterday on CoinMarketCap that there was what appeared to be another hard-fork of bitcoin being traded called Bitcoin Unlimited.

This post is partly a question/investigation, and also a call for comments from people with more knowledge.

What Do We Know?

According to the page on Coin Market Cap, Bitcoin Unlimited (Futures) has been trading since march 29th of this year. How I never spotted this before I'll never know. What I find interesting is why it is listed in the first place?

According to the BU website, they state that they are NOT a hard fork:

Bitcoin Unlimited by itself is not a hard fork. It is rather a tool to help the ecosystem to find consensus about a blocksize limit increasing hardfork and execute it. It just enables nodes and miners to agree or disagree with a change. When the majority agrees that it is needed, it can be done. Bitcoin Unlimited is not a contradiction to developer-proposed blocksize limits, to public debates or to flag day activation. Bitcoin Unlimited is not a hardfork to an unlimited blocksize. It is a tool to raise the blocksize limit without splitting the network. An instrument to find and execute consensus.

So what is going on here? Looking at the Bitcoin Unlimited website, it appears that it is merely a version of the Bitcoin core:

As software, Bitcoin Unlimited has forked from the C++ codebase of Bitcoin Core v0.12. Bitcoin Unlimited’s developers changed a small part of the consensus system to enable the ecosystem to find Emergent Consensus (EC) on the prevailing blocksize limit.

Source: https://www.bitcoinunlimited.info/faq

Not being up to date on the foundations of Bitcoin myself (yet, I'm learning!) I'm assuming that Bitcoin Unlimited is a software/code base for mining, something a long the lines of Steem in-a-box perhaps?

I also see from their main page that there is a version of Bitcoin Unlimited for each of the current blockchains:

BU Bitcoin Cash Edition version 1.1.1.0 has been released, please fetch it from the download section.

BU standard version 1.0.3 has been released, please fetch it from the download section

So I'm still no wiser at this point. So I checked on Reddit and found this thread, which has a question:

Is Bitcoin unlimited still planning a hard fork at some point, or will it just follow bitcoin cash now?

The thread sadly contains no real answer to that question.

So What Is Going On?

Bitcoin Unlimited Futures (BU) are currently only trading on Bitfinex, so maybe it's purely people wildly speculating that BU will at some point create a hard fork of it's own. But from what I can tell, it doesn't appear that there is any intention for Bitcoin Unlimited to do so.

What do you think? Maybe you know more of the technical side of things and can explain what might be happening here? (I'd love to know!)

Or, could we actually be seeing the start of this:

Source: Twitter

Thanks to @penguinpablo for bringing that to my attention here 😆.

Thanks for viewing!