i don't think this is a good comparison because at the end of the day both Coca-Cola and Pepsi are pretty much the same thing! and whether you choose one or the other is a matter of preference for the most part and wouldn't make any difference whatsoever!!!
but bitcoin is completely different from fiat (the old centralized systems) as it came along and has been decentralized. so choosing one over the other is not just matter of preference anymore, it is a matter of wanting the actual different characteristics that the difference is going to offer.

i don't think terms such as "Hodling" could even be added to a "dictionary" since these words are more like slang rather than actual words that would be used. and dictionaries don't have slang in them as far as i know.

meh!
there are lots of crazies who have done similar things. the thing that people forget is that they will experience a lot of stress pretty soon even if they don't show it publicly. it is a matter of a lot of money for most of them and "going all in" is not something you could easily ignore and sleep calm at night while bitcoin suddenly has something like a 30% drop overnight!

a "bull trap" is when price is on a downtrend and only has a small rise temporarily before continuing to go down. there is no downtrend in bitcoin! we only had a fall in about one single day and have been in this price level ever since! which makes what we have these days another sideways.

that is a good suggestion but it is never practical as traders don't really go in and out of the market entirely. they go in and out of coins. so they will end up having their coins on exchanges specially since if they wanted to keep withdrawing their coins and re-depositing it every day the fees would amass to a big amount.

P.S. if someone ever thought an exchange that is big like Binance is safe or "trustworthy" they should recite the name of all the previously gigantic exchanges that scammed their users: Mt Gox, Cryptsy, Bittrex are my top 3.

if you don't think of it as "selecting cells" then the solution would become clear. (same with your link about excel). basically it is two steps: 1) assigning a number to each cell. 2) selecting a random number!
in this case each cell is the binary representation so it has only two modes: on and off or 1 and 0. so all you have to do is generate a random number, convert it to binary and set cells state using the bits.
by the way that is what the random button at the bottom of the square is supposed to do.

does anybody know if Electrum with -testnet command would also support Lightning Network in this new release?
i would very much prefer to test things on testnet with value-less coins to get comfortable using LN through Electrum. specially since my knowledge of LN is pretty much minimal.

neither because those aren't the only options.
maybe back in 2010 bitcoin price was manipulated since the market size was tiny and there weren't really more than 1 major exchange by that time. nowadays the market is still small but in comparison to early years it is gigantic and more importantly there are numerous major exchanges that don't have a volume share more than 8%. nobody can manipulate or control the price in the current situation.

that doesn't mean manipulation doesn't exist though. just like any other market, bitcoin market is also susceptible to manipulations. it is the degree that keeps changing.

with crypto? absolutely not because the sheer number of different cryptocurrencies is more than inflationary as there is more and more being created every day.

with bitcoin? probably not. mainly because bitcoin first has to replace fiat and be used everywhere to take the first step to changing anything about inflation and that first step can not be taken.

bitcoin.org is open source and it can be found on GitHub. i couldn't find any instructions for adding a new exchange to that repository but here you can find how others have done it in the past: https://github.com/bitcoin-dot-org/bitcoin.org/search?q=add+exchange&type=Issues
you can open an issue in that repo and ask for help if you don't know how to open a PR.

that is why i am not yet sure about it. this is just a feeling that i have based on the fact that usually after a sudden unpredictable drop like what we had recently, there is always a stable phase where market just goes sideways for a long time. we have to stay here for a month at least for us to be sure of this trend though.
unfortunately every time we have a sudden drop then sideways trend like this it ends up seeing it followed by a shoot up after the rise starts! like when price went from <$4k to $6k and then $13k in a short time after.

Electrum nodes (aka servers) can not compromise your security. the only communication you are making with these nodes is to get block headers, your transaction history and to broadcast new tx you make. all of which are public information, nothing secret to compromise. the only thing malicious sever could do is to lie about state of a transaction. they could tell you it is either confirmed or unconfirmed (or doesn't exist at all) while it is the other way around.

the only real risk is your privacy but you are already giving it up as soon as you start using an SPV wallet instead of a full verification node.

schnorr is not there to solve all the problems. it is an "option" to give to users who want smaller transactions. and its contribution to scaling is both smaller tx size and a lot faster verification of such transactions.

it is not just about multi-sigs either. it applies to all transactions that use schorr signatures. for instance i would switch to schnorr as soon as it is activated because all my (single sig) transactions would shrink by 9 bytes per input (signature) simply because the dumb ass DER encoding is dropped!

wait a minute, why do you think gold has a stable value? as a matter of fact just recently the value dropped about 5% and this year it is up 21%. of course it is a lot more stable compared to bitcoin but we shouldn't even make that comparison because of the age and size of the two market.

you can split bitcoin network into two parts: miners and nodes.
a miner is just a hardware (ASIC) that has computing power. the only thing they do is "calculate" (perform hashes) nothing else. but they connect to a node to receive the data they should hash. the node decides which transaction it should give the miner.
now a mining pool is a server that is running a node and the miners connect to in order to share the work. that pool/node decides which transaction to mine. for example they decide to only include transactions that are paying 2 satoshi/byte at least, another one could decide to include 0 satoshi/byte,... they could also decide which non-standard transaction to include in the blocks.
in all cases when a miner shares the work and they find a block they receive their share of the reward no matter what they mined (as long as the block was valid of course).

that is really messed up! every single documentation that i have ever seen has always said "it must not be compressed or it will not be mined". now i went back and checked the out, they are all are ambiguous about it!
take BIP143 for example:
https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0143.mediawiki#restrictions-on-public-key-type

from bitcoincore.com: https://bitcoincore.org/en/segwit_wallet_dev/#creation-of-p2sh-p2wpkh-address

the orange parts are the ambiguity! why did they do this?!

if a standard is to be followed, in my opinion the minimum post requirement must be removed from the signature campaigns because it could (in many cases) encourage spam. people will have to make that many posts to reach the payment target and not everyone is capable of it so their quality could go down.

although i am hoping to see $10k sooner than later but i am starting to think that we may end up experiencing another prolonged and boring stable phase like what we had at the beginning of this year with $3k range. of course it is still too early to say and things are still unpredictable. but we are now entering the third week of price being in this range and the market has been calming down a lot too which makes me more confident in what i said.

first that "shop" has to have adopted that cryptocurrency or stable coin to accept it then you can simply pay it by carry around your wallet (like on your phone).
the problem is that "shops" barely accept bitcoin payments let alone want to accept any of the altcoins!

why would you want to do that when you can't pay directly with crypto?!!!
use fiat directly and avoid the fees that would associate with multiple conversions and the service costs and also the volatility of cryptocurrencies!

bitcoin isn't centralized to be controlled by bitcoin core devs so that they could adjust some code and change consensus rules with a snap of a finger!
what makes your output unspendable is consensus rules that dictate SegWit outputs must all use compressed public keys. in order to change that you have to create a fork and get the majority of the network to accept that fork.

i am curious, how did you create this address in first place?