i thought this technique of "fooling people by paying them" only works in under developed third world countries with a gigantic gap between the upper class and middle/lower classes in society. it is kind of funny to see it in a supposedly advanced country like US. it would be interesting to know how much this has worked on Americans, and more importantly how long would it take to see the effects of it in their inflation and by how much. i have seen 20% increase in 1 year before...

if bitcoin could help these countries go around the sanctions and help with their transactions then it would have made some sense to me but since it can't (being small and too volatile) i don't think it is plausible. besides if accumulation were the goal of the governments then they could have simply impose new tax laws on anybody who owns bitcoin to pay a portion of it to the revenue services, that way in no time without any cost they would accumulate a lot of bitcoins no matter what the price of it is at that time.

i still don't understand why would anybody even search this term in first place!
all the wallets that i have seed are already supporting QR codes, specially if you are building a cold storage like a paper wallet and want to print your private keys they already do that for you.
additionally if it is general things you want to turn into a QR code like your transaction or your address,  then searching QR code generator would suffice although still not a good idea to use them.

in the end, whatever strategy you choose it is all about the amount of money you are left with when the day ends. for example if you enter with 0.1BTC and leave with 0.15BTC then you have succeeded. for example i consider my altcoin trading days successful because even with losses due to bad trades or my bot having bugs i made profit even when Bittrex.com scammed me and stole my bitcoins, i was left with more bitcoins in my wallet than the beginning.

bitcoin network is working with the internet, the nodes all connect to each other via the internet, the miners then connect to these nodes. so you have to eventually have your transaction broadcast over the internet to these nodes.
the idea is that you don't have to personally connect to the internet and send it to the nodes, you could use an intermediary to do that for you. for example you could broadcast it using radio waves to send your transaction to a satellite[1] and that satellite broadcasts it over the network on your behalf.
i haven't seen other methods be used but theoretically it is true, you could use SMS,... to transmit a tx.
- other user already explained why giving private key is not needed.

[1] https://blockstream.com/satellite/

if this rise were a reaction to the price rise then it is the rise that happened so far this year from $31000 to $10000 (a 220% rise) not because of a rise that may come in the future because of halving! if miners start thinking that way then they should increase their hashrate every single day because one way or another there is a price rise coming to bitcoin.

you say this address belongs to you, right?
did your blockchain.com wallet generate it randomly or did you acquire it from somewhere else (like an exchange, or another similar service) and then import it in your wallet? do you have its private key or just the address?

the behavior looks nothing like a hacked wallet (spend after 1 hour instead of immediately), but it looks more like what services like an exchange or a gambling site,... does.

sounds to me that the "writer" has been bag holding a bunch of shitcoins and he wishes to recover from the 90% loss in total that he has experienced because of his bag holding. otherwise Bakkt has nothing to do with any of these shitcoins that were mentioned here. if anything it will lead to a bitcoin price rise and that rise can trigger another wave of altcoin dumps as investors migrate from altcoins back to bitcoin again, like they always do during bitcoin price rises...

you are thinking one dimensionally. you should think of it as a choosing SHA512 from a group of hash algorithms, a group that contains better options at lower cost which makes choosing this one not the best choice. so as long as we can achieve a high security with a 256-bit digest we should stick to that and avoid unnecessary size increase even if storage was of no concern.

in order for a bot to work, the exchange has to have a working API that the bot could connect to and "post" requests. this exchange only has the public API part which means all you can do is to get the prices, list of coins,... but it does not have any private API for submitting orders, getting balance,... so there can not be any bots that work with it.
check out their docs: https://coinexchangeio.github.io/slate/#public-api

i don't think they will ever change that either. i remember seeing this same sentence on their page a very long time ago (2 years?)

just because some research says a big percentage of those who are doing day trading are losing money it doesn't mean it is like that if you start doing it! basically if anybody starts trading in any form correctly without greed and being over emotional, the results will be positive for them. the problem is that most people doing day-trading are not "trading" they are instead "gambling" and the result for gamblers is never good no matter what they do. that is something these studies never look into.

yes they are very safe. the smallest word count (12) is coming from a 128 bits of entropy which is strong. there is no need to change this entropy strength any time soon, specially no in one year. probably in another 50 years or more depending on whether things are going to change in efficiency of computing the underlying algorithms.

think of this as a positive experience. next time you create a video you have this experience so you make videos that are more resilient to take downs by Youtube team.
additionally since the puzzle is over you should now explain how to solve the puzzle here so that people could see the level of it and whether it was designed well or not or even if it was solvable.

as someone who has a bot like this and have tried it for a long time (not recently though) i can tell you that it is always profitable BUT the problem is that such profits are not really that high to justify the effort of spending time to code it and then spending time running it. they are usually small and on top of all that, there is a huge risk involved for when the market changes.
for example the orders you have your eyes on could simply be filled the moment you want to fill them and you get stuck holding some shitcoin that you didn't want to. eventually you would be forced to make a choice of dumping it at a lower price and losing money.

it is about at what layer this is being used.

* if scrypt is used to generate the mnemonic from a passphrase as it is with WarpWallet and brain wallets, it is a bad idea because even if it is a memory expensive KDF it still doesn't solve the problem of people using simple passwords and the attacker does NOT have to have access to anything to steal their coins. all they have to do is to iterate over most common words and rob them. look at this: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4768828.0 it obviously will take a lot longer than SHA256 but it will not be impossible. if there is incentive, they will do it.

* but if it is used only for the encryption step, the attacker first has to gain physical access to your paper wallet for example and then attempt brute forcing that. so in this case scrypt is only used as one of the many security layers you are putting in place.

no, even my field of study has nothing to do with programming. i just always liked computers so at some point in my life i picked up programming as a hobby and slowly learnt more about it (on my own). also ever since i found out about bitcoin, i was fascinated so i also started looking under the hood and slowly learned more about the technical aspect of it. you can call it being "self taught".
although i still have a lot to learn, but i certainly enjoy it.

not only switching to SHA512 is unlikely, i would say it is stupid.
for starters it would make everything twice as big and that is while we are trying so hard to compress everything and make them smaller to keep it manageable (for storage and scaling).
on top of that you can't just stop there, you have to change the curve too. with a 256 bit curve it is not useful to use a 512 bit hash function. you have to also switch to a 512+ bit curve like secp521r1. i am also sure that switch to SHA512 would break 90% of bitcoin implementations because they either don't have the functionality to calculate "e" during ECDSA since they never needed it or they have a false one in place.

and finally as i have said before, unlike SHA1 versus SHA256 where the algorithms are different, in SHA512 versus SHA256 the algorithm is exactly the same (hence the switch being stupid). when a hash function becomes obsolete/weak like SHA1 it is not because of the size of it (160 bit) it is because a vulnerability in the algorithm was found, again like SHA1 which leads to attacks becoming easier (decreasing complexity from from 2⁸⁰ down to 2^63.1).
if such switch some day happens it will be to a different 256-bit algorithm such as Keccak-256, Blak2b-256,...

i don't think this is entirely true.
of course as there is an overall increase in bitcoin adoption, there is an increase in number of people doing different things such as holding their coins on exchanges but i don't think the percentage has changed. for example if before there were x% doing that while total was 100k, there are still the same x% doing that if total is 200k, heck i would say that the percentage has shrank even due to all exchange hacks!

why? because the order books on exchanges are still pretty thin. if it were any more packed that would have shown a great increase in the number of people holding coins on exchanges and that would have led to less volatility and less manipulation of price.

another indication is the huge spikes we see in number of unconfirmed transactions each time price makes a move. each rise or drop causes "day traders" who are NOT storing their coins on exchanges to move their coins to exchanges to sell or buy and withdraw right away.

being "old" is relative, when we are speaking of a news affecting the price even a couple of hours makes the news old let alone days. that's how the market reaction to a news has always worked, it is right away. even in some cases the reaction comes BEFORE the news (like with insider information) and after the news is spread the price shows the effects within 6 to 12 hours.
10 days later after the news, everything is already done and over with!

you most probably can not do that because figuring out who an address belongs to in bitcoin is pretty hard and sometimes near impossible although bitcoin is not anonymous!
so the only thing you can do is to first do what @prix said in previous comment (VPN, change IP, login to Binance, check deposit history, copy txid, search on block explorer) and see where the coins came from. then copy the address(es) and try a service such as https://www.walletexplorer.com/ sometimes you can get lucky and they could show you which service those addresses belong to. otherwise you have to use their paid services (which i don't think is suitable for your purpose).
also you can always find all the accounts you had on any other site, log into each of them and check their withdrawal history and see whether any of them have an amount equal to 0.10 btc at that particular date.