i just want to add something to this point. part of the risk is not a matter of length of time, it is the matter of storing coins on exchanges. in other words when you are depositing your coins on an exchange even for a single second, as soon as that deposit is confirmed you are at risk of losing your money. the exchange can scam you that very instant.
which is why if you want to start trading, you should also consider this risk among other risks involving trading.

well it is a matter of how you value your own security. sometimes we have to endure the complicated process to reach the high security we need. it doesn't come cheap.
with that said i am a windows user and have only verified signature on windows once. i didn't like Kleopatra either. but i did a workaround, i used Ubuntu. download verify Ubuntu signature and now i have that for easy verification each time i download a new software.

it is probably the biggest attempt but certainly not the first. there has been a lot more in the past, i myself have reported at least 10 or 12 malicious repositories on github trying to fool people into thinking they are downloading the "real" electrum from the "real repository"!

from 2016: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1588906.0
a good idea to inform others as much as we can, but still the information is already out there, users must look for it themselves.

1. when nobody uses bitcoin in your scenario, no more transactions are made, the blockchain doesn't grow anymore,... that means it is dead. that is basically how we define a dead coin!
and there is no coming back from it. in your scenario, the world is not limited to a single village that people can gather around and come to an agreement. what if for example Japan came back and started mining months before other countries. people in for example US are not going to accept that chain,.... then we will have at least a dozen different chains.

2. then you define another reason for calling that hypothetical bitcoin "dead" because without being completely decentralized bitcoin is as good as dead.

if you already have created the address then it is too late to ask about "generation" of it. and there is no way the buyer could be sure you won't keep the private key that you already have.

this page has some small explanation but has additional links with more information in it which you could read about split-key method: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Split-key_vanity_address

the "cryptocurrency" market aka altcoins will most probably collapse hard and we may see disappearance of at least 90% of them simply because they are all gambles with ridiculously high risks and during a financial crisis nobody goes near anything that risky with their money specially when that thing is mainly manipulated and is getting pumped and dumped.

but bitcoin could be a candidate to see a significant rise. because we have seen so far that it has always moved on its own mostly disregarding the rest of the world (and markets) with whatever is happening in them. that makes it a separate thing that could be the option for investors who would be looking for a way to save the value of their money while their fiat tanks.

it is in no way the "first" case where the government seizes bitcoins from someone specially if that someone is a criminal. there has been lots of cases before this, Silk Road for the most popular and old example where FBI seized somewhere around $100 million in total if not more from those involved in it.

McAfee said it to be heard all over the news first so that he could find followers which then he used to advertise shitcoins and scam ICOs that paid him a lot of money. so ultimately that statement was made to make him money!
he mainly abused the desperation in some people for wanting to see a ton of profit in unreasonably short time.

actually this does not concern wallets at all because technically you should not even care where you download the binaries from because even if you download them from the official website it still is not safe until you cryptographically verify its digital signature.
the only thing that you should ever worry about is acquiring the real public key of the developer. then you could even receive the binaries in your Email from someone and check the signature with that public key. as long as PGP is not broken (which it is not) there is no way to fake this.

those people who got scammed (mentioned in the comment you quoted) got scammed because they never bothered with signature verification ever.

payment processors should be used for when the merchants want to deal with fiat not bitcoin directly so that they could mitigate the volatility. that is why they are still using them to this day. otherwise if they are going to just get paid in bitcoin and receive bitcoin, they shouldn't have used a payment processor in first place!
and since when fiat is involved KYC is expected and there shouldn't be any complains about it in my opinion.

"transaction speed" is two things:
* the propagation speed which is the time it takes for a tx to reach nearly all the nodes. and it only takes a couple of seconds. it is equivalent of the bank sending a money transfer to another account in another bank for example which can take a day or two.
* the confirmation time which is the time it takes for a tx to be include in a block and it is limited by the time between the blocks. and that is equivalent of your bank transfer becoming final and irreversible and that could take months.
neither of these have anything to do with SegWit though.
these are benefits of SegWit: https://bitcoincore.org/en/2016/01/26/segwit-benefits/

and by the way it did not enable any of the things you listed. it is supposed to make them easier otherwise all of them (LN, Schnorr,...) can happen without SegWit but harder because there are complications such as malleability. for instance Bcash has already enabled Schnorr although it has also implemented most of SegWit but it is technically without SegWit

i actually have never seen this "vision" be had by anybody who understands what bitcoin is. usually people who get too caught up in the profit making process and think bitcoin is something magical also end up thinking that it is also replacing everything including fiat, banks, and a lot of other things that concern blockchain!
the reality is that bitcoin is an additional option (a currency) that people have been having ever since 2009 for whenever they want financial freedom and want to cut the hands of the middle men from their pockets. it is not supposed to replace anything. it is suppose to exist to give people that option that never existed before.

i think mention of "loans" in that article was misleading because the negative rates has nothing to do with the loans you take from the banks, the way i understand it. these rates are the rates that banks pay as "profit" or interest on the money people keep with them and negative that means your balance shrinks over time.
so the effects of this on bitcoin is what @Kakmakr said above, people would start pulling out their balance from banks and look for investments. one of these investment options among many is going to be bitcoin.

the thing about halving is that when it happens, the rate at which new coins enter circulation reduces by 50% so in a way it is cutting the new supply by half. and since the "new demand" is increasing, that reduction disturbs the balance that existed before hence leading to a price rise to reach another balance between the two factors.
everything else like the rise prior to halving is pure hype and will be small. the real rise is always coming after the halving.

that wouldn't change a thing. as long as your money is hostage in the pocket of a centralized exchange, they can at any moment decide to force you to reveal your true identity even if your trading volume was less than 0.001BTC. so even if they allowed TOR, ... they could still force their users to comply with KYC and submit their documents.

you can't say it is without any extensions when the extension is already pre-installed in this "special" browser you download. besides it doesn't seem like the best idea to trust your browser with your private keys (as a wallet) when it is relying on JavaScript and could face a lot of problems and backdoors.

by the way, weren't they asking for KYC when you used cryptocurrencies in their network?

news agencies are always reporting what people want to hear not what the reality is. specially when it comes to speculation they go with the flow. for example when price is rising they talk about how it is going higher and vice versa when it is dropping.
in a way you could say that their reports may look like predicting the future but in fact it is only reporting the history. so when they say "you should sell bitcoin, it will drop lower" they are really saying "bitcoin has already dropped, and you should have sold already".

what about exchanges themselves abusing such a system?
a malicious exchange could easily manipulate its own market to get a better price and then having better access they could use the "link" between their exchange and the other one to make a good amount of profit per day.

the point was that you were comparing "streaming a video" with "ECDSA verification". and you can't make that comparison.

on lightning network, unlike on main-net, not all the nodes are supposed to verify all the transactions! so even if a million tx/s happens, a single node may not handle (and verify) more than a hundred.

no exchange has ever added any shitcoin to their platform just because some random dude advertised it. they also don't add them because they are good coins or bad coins. they only care about and look at the possibility of profit from that coin. and profit comes from how many people want to trade that shitcoin and is mainly determined with the daily volume. according to coinmarketcap.com BCash has the 7th highest 24 hour volume after ETC and before XRP.
nobody uses it though, as blocks are still empty

one of the reasons why "arbitrage" is possible between exchanges is because there is no easy way of transferring funds between them. if that problem were to be solved then there would have not been any price difference to let anybody do arbitrage trading.