There are 2 different ports, the RPC port and the node port. The RPC port allows you to connect to it to issue commands. The node port is a public port which allows you to connect to other nodes and vice versa. The different port number you see in getpeerinfo is the node port so that other nodes can connect to you.

Using the fees. If the block size stays the same, people will need to pay at least 0.005 BTC per transaction to keep the same miner's reward once the reward goes away. If there is enough transaction volume, then an even higher fee is required just so that your transaction will be confirmed quickly, and even that is not guaranteed. Increasing the block size keeps both the users and the miners happy. Miners will get paid, and if they include more transactions, they get more in fees. Users don't need to pay a large fee for a transaction, and they won't need to wait long times for a transaction to be confirmed. As long as there is still space in blocks for more transactions, most transactions will be confirmed quickly and miners can collect the most fees.

As said above, Paypal can be reversed, and this is risky. Also, with your negative trust, I don't think that people will be willing to make a deal with you, even for $5.

This wouldn't work with large amounts of transactions. If there is a waiting list, then your transaction is not going to be confirmed in a timely matter. Once the list gets long enough, waiting for your transaction to be confirmed could take several blocks, and thus several hours. It would push out more than jsut micro transactions if there are enough transactions. Once the block is full, it can't take anymore transactions, even those that aren't micro transactions.

For an escrow, you can choose anyone on this list: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=108716.0. These are all people trusted for escrowing. You could either choose who you want, or have the buyer choose.

Yes. Any left over money stays gets credited to your account and you can use it in other purchases. One gift card could buy many things.

Possibly. If your multi-sig address is with keys that you own in one place, it won't really help. Alternatively, if you keep the keys separately, it makes it more difficult to spend your coins quickly. It really depends on how secure and how paranoid you are.

It would be great if both Ebay and Amazon accepted Bitcoin, but Paypal doesn't like Bitcoin so Ebay probably will not support Bitcoin anytime soon. Amazon, on the other hand, might begin accepting Bitcoin within a few years.

It depends on your firewall. It might be blocking inbound connections to your node, but it will allow outbound connections. I had to setup port forwarding in my router as well as configure my firewall in my computer to allow to inbound connections to my node.

Bitcoin Core should automatically allow outbound connections. Core by itself is a full node. You can check your connections in the debug window. If you open help > debug window, inside the information tab, there should be something that says "connections." Next to that is a number, which is the total number of connections. Next to that in parantheses it says "in:" and "out:" these two are the number of inbound and outbound connections. Since you are running Bitcoin Core, the number next to "out" should be between 1 and 8. Inbound connections can vary.

Since the malware writer would not have any expenses, any amount of Bitcoin or any cryptocurrency mined on that botnet would be profit. The electricity cost is zero for the attacker, and with some good social and software engineering, the virus could be spread very far. Also, the botnet of thousands of computers can still be rented out for blackhat purposes. It doesn't necessarily need to be dedicated to one thing, it could be multipurpose. This is kind of like this guy: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/sq7cy/iama_a_malware_coder_and_botnet_operator_ama/. He made malware which mined bitcoin, was also a banking trojan, and could ddos.

There is no gavincoin, there is only Bitcoin. The block size increase is planned for a hard fork in Bitcoin when more than 90% of the network uses the proposed protocol.

Definitely the block reward halving. That occurs next July, and the 20 MB blocksize increase is planned for early 2016, a few months before the block halving. The block size increase is planned to occur way before the max transactions with the current block size.

I think you will need a different instance of Abe for each altcoin. It doesn't support all altcoins, and some will need special setup because of the different algorithms. You can find which coins it supports and what needs to be installed on the project README file. If you need help, you might be able to PM or email the main developer of the project. His profile is here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=10593

You probably need a server that you have admin access to. You need to install SQL, Python, and Bitcoind on it, so you will need a VPS. Or you can run it on your own box.

It seems easy to install. You just need to also install some type of SQL database server. Check out their project docs on github here: https://github.com/bitcoin-abe/bitcoin-abe. You need to have it installed on a node that has the full blockchain.

Check the marketplace sub-forum. There are also sites that list places that accept Bitcoin. Here is one linked to by Bitcoin.org: http://usebitcoins.info/

Bitcoin Core has a 64-bit client which has more than enough memory to support a 20 GB block, provided that the hardware has significantly more memory than current standards.

What wallet are you using? Sometimes developers of alternate clients will find a major issue in their software and issue an update.

However, things have changed since Satoshi's comment. There are alternatives and possibly better ways to solve the problem. While I agree that we should raise the block size limit and that a solution must be found, I don't think that we should only do what Satoshi said 5 five years ago when other solutions did not exist, and that what he said may no longer be applicable.