no we don't.
we are instead expecting the same uptrend with big roller coasters are the past 10 years to be repeated!

it wasn't a pump and it wasn't a golden year for bitcoin just because price went up! it was a golden year because we had a couple of major mass adoption cases such as Japan adopting bitcoin as a legal way of payment, also we had the end of a 3+ year of dispute over bitcoin scaling.

you can't ask for "concrete proof" in speculation!!!

"we" didn't expect that. only people who got caught in the hype and thought a bubble can continue growing forever ended up disappointed. just like those who got disappointed because they thought the reverse-bubble can drop forever!

the thing about compiled version of bitcoin core is that it is a deterministic build so you don't have to put any trust in bitcoin core developers. that makes things even more decentralized because when they release a binary (compiled version) anybody can compile it and see if the hashes are the same (it is called gitian builds). this basically acts as an insurance that the binaries are indeed the compiled version of the code you see on github not something else.

that is kind of a red flag about something that is using the term "mining" in its description!
none of the miners pay any fees when they are making a payment like this. instead they created the transaction with zero fee and mine it themselves. all the mining pools payments that i have seen so far are like this!
if they are paying fee, it may mean they don't even have any hashrate to mine any block and have been running a Ponzi scheme!

well in order to do anything on your computer you first need a computer program that can do that thing for you. so you either have to write the code yourself or download the code that someone else has written. when you go to bitcoin.org you are downloading the open source code that groups of expert programmers have put a lot of effort in developing. it is an implementation of the protocol: https://bitcoin.org/en/developer-reference

the way you  connect to other nodes is like any other peer to peer system, you initially either have hard coded IP addresses or connect to a seeder and find them. then for future times your client stores a list of node IP addresses which it uses to connect to. and while connected you constantly share the list of other nodes with others. initial peer discovery: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/a/3537/87716

the link in that quote is the "source"! remove the /releases from the end and you'll see the code.

you are pointed to a website like bitcoin.org because it is a good source for reading all the basic information you need as a beginner in one place and it is "correct" information unlike many of other sites that contain misleading stuff. and you do NOT download the blockchain there, you only find links to different software that are open source and are created to let you connect to the network.

what is this "network"? it is every computer anywhere in the world that has the blockchain and is connecting to others and communicating with them. this computer is called a node. you connect to these nodes and download the blockchain, transactions in the mempool, new blocks, broadcast your new transactions to them which they propagate by sending to others,...

it is an interesting thought and it could interest some people in bitcoin specially if it is not given and promoted as an investment but instead as a gifted "money" which they could use to buy anything they wanted (assuming they could find a shop to spend it at).
this could be a card with a nice design on the front and the private key inside of it with a short walk-through about what bitcoin is, how they could claim it and which wallet they could use.

other projects aren't really writing any "whitepaper" though. they have changed the meaning of it too. it is currently used as a way of advertising the useless token they are trying to sell by giving vague information and only false promises. and sometimes even create and solve imaginary problems in one place!
that's 99% of the cases.

paying based on USD value is obviously more beneficial to the advertisers since bitcoin overall movement is rising and price keeps going higher so they will be paying less and less. conversely paying in BTC is more beneficial to the users. so obviously i prefer payment in BTC not USD equivalent.

with that said and keeping in mind that bitcoin is a currency itself and should be treated as such, i think for certain businesses it does not even make sense to pay in USD value.

we can categorize them into three:
1. a business that is running based on USD value. for example a shop selling goods that change value based on bitcoin price like steam selling games.
in this case it makes perfect sense because if price goes up, they earn less bitcoin so they can pay less bitcoin to their advertisers and vice versa.

2. a business that is running purely with bitcoin and is either not affected by its price at all or the effects are minimal. for example a gambling site or a mixing service. the former is affected a little by the price and the latter not at all.
in this case it makes no sense to pay in USD equivalent. the business is earning bitcoin and that amount is not affected by bitcoin price fluctuations. the only effect it may have is when we have a gigantic price rise like from $800 to $20,000 otherwise their revenue stays the same when price goes from $8k to $10k for example so their payment should not change.

3. like 2 but the effects are in reverse meaning if price goes up, the revenue of the business grows.
for example an exchange, when bitcoin price went from below $1k to above $10k levels their revenues (purely in bitcoin) grew a lot. these businesses paying in USD is absurd!

that is not what "pump and dump" means!
a pump and dumps is where price is falsely pushed up and then as it reaches climax the manipulators cash out and price crashes back down. do you see a crash down?
this was a dump and then correction or recovery.

as for the title, a better suggestion is stay away from day trading if you have no idea what you are doing and call rises pumps and falls dump! for a day trader these fluctuations are the only reason why they continue trading.

that is a very good point
my automatic assumption was that the user is already running the wallet inside a sandbox which would isolate it from the main computer and the wallet(s) they may have. since this new software is either shady and without reviews to be trusted. for that i suggest using "virtualbox" (https://www.virtualbox.org/).

i agree with almost everything you said here but there is one thing that i can't agree with. you say we need to delay mass adoption to fix these problems, but that is not how you fix a problem. you have to "change" people's perspective and more importantly change the way current people are introducing bitcoin to others.

for example one of the biggest problems is that people are introducing others to bitcoin as a get rich quick scheme or a cash cow. and when these new people with this view come in, they also fall for the altcoin scams and go into their web of deceit and lose money. eventually we see an increased number of "gamblers" instead of people who are here because they liked the idea of a decentralized currency.
which is why i say we have to first change that view.

then it wouldn't matter if people are also excited about profit.

it is not enough to just move your coins out of the "address" specially when you are using an HD wallet such as Electrum. you have to create an entirely new wallet with a new seed and move your bitcoins there and then import the seed into the fork coin's wallet.
you say this later one but there isn't enough emphasis on it, and this is a very important matter people forget.

then why didn't bitcoin price rise up previous times where similar programs ran on the state television stations?
it seems to me like people are trying too hard to justify a simple price rise that is only a correction of a big drop that created a negative/reverse bubble. the fact that some program ran on TV in one country that many people may not have even seen it is not the reason why price went up, not to mention that even if "new people" were introduced to bitcoin, they wouldn't just run to buy bitcoin right away! specially since there aren't any exchanges left in China for them to buy bitcoin from!

you are comparing apples and oranges!

your other arguments are like saying our browsers must not have stopped rejecting SHA1 SSL certificates because some people might be lazy in upgrading their certificate to a more secure hash algorithm even though there was a transition period given to everyone to move to new algorithms! instead they should have given the "lazy server" a workaround to push their SHA1 certificates as valid!!!

a "downtrend" is a "trend" not a single drop case. what we had was the later and that doesn't make it into a trend. price fell below $10k on September 24 and in less than a day it was at the bottom at $8k range. then that lasted about a month until 4 days ago another last attempt at pushing the price down took place before the manipulation was lifted and price jumped back up to real levels.
that is not a trend, that is a temporary push down.

your password being incorrect has nothing to do with upgrading Electrum itself. you can click on the seed icon at the bottom  right side of the wallet window and it should ask you for your password. enter it and see if it shows you the seed or an error. if it does show the seed then write it down on a paper and you are good to go.

by the way it does not matter how long you leave this open, the moment you connect to a legitimate Electrum server your wallet's network instance crashes and it gets stuck. this is intentional to force everyone to upgrade to latest version in order to avoid losing money due to another vulnerability that existed in older versions.

i'm not sure how Trezor works but can we categorize it as a deterministic build just because of its firmware could be built deterministically?

thanks but i am not interested in altcoins.

if something were broken it must be removed right away. you can't compromise the entire multi billion dollar worth of system just because some people might be lazy!
when people enter bitcoin world the first thing they learn is that they are now responsible and in full control of their own money. that includes keeping an eye on development of bitcoin and changing directions if needed.

they don't look that dormant to me. it is impossible to know for sure and walletexplorer doesn't recognize a couple of them that i searched, but they look more like funds a big service puts in its cold storage specially the way these inputs are created.
for example https://www.blockchain.com/btc/tx/741aa0b3ff1eb733c7b096fb18b0f4ee6891f98a7ad8900f5530b21d0b9db46d
and the change (527.6BTC) goes into what looks more like making payments to withdrawal requests, such as what exchanges do.
could this be Mt Gox?

have you studied SHA1?
i think it would be a good idea to first check what happened to SHA1 and how they were able to increase the efficiency of their collision attack so much that it could happen in a much smaller space than 2^80 (i think there was a scientific article about how they could reduce to 2^50). check these articles out and see their approach, it could give you a lot of good information.