the main problem is that the master public key (or basically any extended priv/pub key) doesn't have any information about the derivation paths, address type,... his MPK might be for a Bech32 set of addresses which use both a different path and a different address from a legacy address type. so there are multiple BIPs and paths depending on the combination.

by the way BIP32 doesn't define specific values for paths.

the chart is misleading and this statement is absolutely wrong.
bitcoin's blockchain never split at all. it has been growing as always as a singular and immutable ledger.
what this is referring to is creation of copies. since bitcoin's both source code and blockchain are open and free to copy, lots of people during the 10 years have copied it and created their own altcoins none of them mean "splitting bitcoin's blockchain"!

as for the chart, it is misleading because it is ignoring the most important factor that is inside the line it draws on it and calls them "BCH and BTG".
that line coincides with the end of a debate that was going on for at least 3 years called "scaling debate" that had damaged bitcoin a lot and had prevented the growth for a long time. when it finally came to an end in August 2017 with activation of SegWit, the confidence came back to the market and investors started buying bitcoin and that was the reason why the price went up.
if anything the dozens of garbage fork coins such as BTG, BCH, BPrivate, BSilver,... prevented and slowed down the rise by a lot.

that is only partly right in my opinion.

majority of those who are doing technical analysis and "draw lines" on the charts don't really know what they are doing. most of them are literary choosing random points on the chart and link them together with a line and call it "TA".
a couple of weeks ago someone did exactly that and was calling for a drop to $4000 with his random lines!
basically you can reach any price if your points are random enough

but that doesn't mean TA itself is 50/50. TA is still good if done right. it is not supposed to predict the future, nothing can. but it is supposed to show you trends and the most possible scenarios and basically help you understand what is going on in the market by looking at a chart.

seeing some level of manipulation in the market doesn't mean "control". you can manipulate price of anything, even in the biggest markets out there but as long as the market has a bit of a decent volume and is not that small, it can not be controlled. bitcoin market has not been small for at least 6 years.

if you are making mistakes and not making money (losing?) while in bitcoin market maybe the problem is with your decision making. you should know that trading is not easy and you can't just jump in without any prior experience and expect to be successful!

have you tried searching your question?
always remember that such basic questions have already been asked hundreds of times. a quick search will bring up a lot of answers for you to read.
https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/66/will-deflation-destroy-bitcoin

nowadays every time i see a new claim i only become happier because the more scammers come forward claiming to be Satoshi, the less the effect of their scam is going to be. eventually it becomes a common thing that nobody would give a shit about when someone starts some nonsense about being Satoshi.
this dude is funny too, most of what he wrote is from him spending some time googling bitcoin, from the 980k bitcoin guessed to be owned by Satoshi till the end.

but couldn't it be tested even without "actual" test cases?
something like overflow belongs to lower level functions and in all programming languages that i know there is always easy ways to test them. for instance in object oriented programming we use Mocks to test any special case we want easily!

you shouldn't trust any centralized services and never rely on any of them to be secure. there is absolutely no difference between any of these other options you mentioned in that regard. some are better but all share the same unreliability characteristics.
why do you think i chose my avatar. basically Yahoo let the hacker enter my Email account even though my password was ridiculously strong and there was no other way of entering it. and the result was me losing the ability to withdraw from exchanges i was using... those coins were lost for good.

checking the transaction ID alone is not enough.
start by checking if the address that the transaction is paying to actually belongs to you. you said "put my master public key in configuration module", if it is the zencart's module then it might be their fault. master public key has no additional information for which derivation path to use or even what type of address to use. they might have gotten a wrong address from it. in which case you have actually received the coins but you are looking at a different address inside your Electrum wallet.

it is not a singular private key to be lost containing 1 million bitcoin!!!
1 million is the exaggeration of a guess that started a couple of years ago. basically people start by guessing that Satoshi was the only one mining bitcoin for M number of months then they count the number of blocks (B) mined in that period and also the block rewards (R=50) and multiply these 3 (M*B*R) and come up with a number. which means there are somewhere around B number of keys to different addresses.

i agree with the altcoin mining risks, i sometimes forget to mention them since they are too obvious to me.
but regarding ASICs i have to say in my opinion it depends on what ASIC you are buying. if it is bitcoin (SHA256) ASIC then i don't think it is a good idea to mine an altcoin with it. sticking to bitcoin has lower risks too. in order to choose an altcoin to mine that has to be a lot more profitable than bitcoin and according to https://www.coinwarz.com/miningprofitability/sha-256 nothing satisfies that condition.

but if it is an altcoin ASIC (like scrypt, or keccak,... ASICs) then again you would be subjecting yourself to the high altcoin risks and you would have an ASIC that could only be used for that altcoin and not much else specially not for bitcoin.

it doesn't take that much effort to improve their platform though. and it doesn't have to reduce their profitability either. they just don't want to bother probably because so far they have been getting their customer and they are satisfied with the result.
all they would have to do is to add clear indicators on their massive number of wallets about which one is disabled and which ones are empty. that simple change would solve majority of the problems since most cases are people who deposit some shitcoin or buy it and want to withdraw and their funds get stuck in limbo because the wallet is dead and the interface doesn't show you any warnings. when they contact support, they aren't going to tell them "we fucked up and our wallet is dead" so they remain silent hence making everything worse.

apart from relying on those looking for no KYC, they have been mainly relying on newbies that joined their platform and fell for their absolutely fake pumps on those dead coins that they only list. the main purpose of their signature campaign was also this. they force users to sign up on their exchange and fool them into trading and losing more money while contributing to the total volume.

actually the good news is that nowadays you don't have to really understand anything to get a high priority transaction and get it to confirm faster. all you have to do is to choose a good wallet software that does it properly for you by analyzing the mempool and either suggesting or choosing the appropriate fee in the background. so the end user has little to worry about.

if we exclude bitcoin from the list then it depends on timing. there are years (like this year) that altcoins are dumping hard and everyone loses money even miners so they will have a much harder time reaching profit let alone ROI. of course with no electricity cost it will be better but not by a lot.
then there are years when we have lots of altcoin pumps like 2017 or 2013,... and mining coins, specially the GPU coins (since they are pumped a lot more) is more profitable than coins that are big enough to have an ASIC.

it wouldn't take that much focus though specially if the developer of such wallets focused mainly on copy coins such as litecoin or even less obvious ones. the similarities between different cryptocurrencies are so much that makes writing most parts of a the wallet trivial.
i agree that Electrum will never and should never do it because it is a bitcoin focused wallet.

you are correct but it is off topic here.
with every private key (which is a number) you have one public key (encoded 2 ways: compressed and uncompressed) and an have a lot of different types of addresses which you mentioned here. with P2SH you can have a bunch of different scripts using that public key too.
you also missed P2WSH and nested P2PKH/P2WSH inside P2SH scripts.
remember that you technically never do that, you always derive 1 type of address from a key.

this table (and the topic in general) is working on a puzzle that has paid to 1 type of address (P2PKH) and that is what they have been trying to solve for a long time.

bitcoin is an "investment" right now because it is a "currency".

people don't invest in bitcoin, and the price doesn't go up, just because they see some virtual numbers and hashes on their computer screen. bitcoin has value and gains value because they can use those "virtual" numbers to buy "real" stuff. that is what makes bitcoin real and gives it utility and the value.


gold has at least 50 other use cases. so even if it is not used as a "currency" it still is used for a lot of other things. what is the other usages of bitcoin other than being a currency?

since Poloniex is based on US already, then it is best if you assume that they have reported your history to the different government agencies. even if they haven't it should always be a possibility that they will do in an instant upon request.

in other words you are saying that bitcoin is going to die in a few years because not being a currency means bitcoin becomes useless and that is its death. it is exactly the same as saying gold will no longer be used as a jewelry, and other use cases and will only be used as a store of value!!! that would be the death of gold.
it is the use cases that give everything their value.

that is not "fact" it is your guess and a wrong one.
if you check the stats of the payment processors like BitPay for example or even ask any merchant that has been accepting bitcoin payment for a while they all tell you that people spend bitcoin a lot more when it is rising!

$10k has been a very strong buy support all along because there has always been a ton of investors buying bitcoin at that level. but the thing about bitcoin is that the market is still small and large sales or sometimes panics can push price below even strongest buy supports. but at the same time, they being strong means the price jumps back up again.
expecting it to happen again just because it happened recently doesn't make any sense though!