I don't know about Ethereum...
Pretty big blockchain, very hard to sync, I always got to a grinding halt when I tried it, more then 10 times. Bitcon always sync up, did it like 2 times, with a 100% success rate.
It is also too centralized and their developers like to make very big and controversial changes, that shouldn't work on Bitcoin. Segwit is such a obvious and small change and it is soft fork compared to a hard fork that Ethereum did only to rewrite the valid transactions in blockchain (the DAO fork). Also the PoS system they will implement is pretty untested compared to PoW Bitcoin has. Had more bugs in the clients as well (mostly syncing bugs), when I used it. Not so fluid for use like Bitcoin Core.
The adoption is pretty big on Bitcoin as well, that is hard to battle.
I think that they focused on features to much and not on security and stability. It is great for development, maybe, but currency is a lot better stable,certain and secure.
I mean good luck, but I wouldn't bet on it.

Like I said, you just have to trust in something that should follow the value of bitcoins.
But bitcoins always follows the value of bitcoins and do it in a trustelss and secure way and you can send them across the world easily. They are also more accepted as payment then those shares and you can use them in multisigs.
There is really no benefit for them to bitcoins, just a cost.
All right, a pyramid scheme rewards the ones that get new users, not all, this one is like a communist pyramid scheme, my bad
The point is that there is no value behind it, just a promise of exchanging it back to bitcoins I guess. But it is easier and more secure to just have bitcoins.

I don't understand the goal here. If you want to create many vanity addresses from the same public key, then all of them will have one private key. So this isn't really for many users, it is if one user wants many vanity addresses and that they are transparently connected to each other for anyone to see.

You could just use Tor and create a Tor hidden service. That way your firewall won't bother you, since all the connections will seem as outgoing and you can keep your IP hidden, so no one will know that you are the owner of that node.

It is easy to setup Tor with Bitcoin Core, as it has a default port setup in the options and more. You can search about Tor and how to create a hidden service. It is easy, you can PM me if you need any help.

Let them have them
20 millions we are talking about here mate.

How could I trust the criminal will go with his end of the deal? Does he have a high trust rating on bitcointalk? Can we use an escrow?

I really wouldn't want to feed the shark. I am sorry, but I will keep my millions for the good of mankind.

It is like Bitcoin, but without any benefits of Bitcoin
It is not decentralized, not secure, not trustless, not anonymous, not possible to send across the world, not able to use multisig,...
And the dividend is as much of a dividend as the pyramid scheme. You get a % of new members.

Isn't this what New York stock exchange is for? Bitcoin index has been listed there for years now.
https://www.nyse.com/quote/index/NYXBT

Bill Gates is currently the richest man in the world and his net worth was 90 billion as of July this year. So there really isn't even 1/5th of a person with 500 billion dollars
As I understand, Bill Gates will give vast majority of his wealth to charity and so will his friend Warren Buffet (I believe he said he will give 99%), the second wealthiest man in the world. So this clearly doesn't apply to everyone. It is kind of useless to just sit on that money, so they give it away to people in need.
I believe that most of the richest people would want poverty gone. Not just out of the good hearth, but also because their products aren't really something that people in poverty buy. How many of billionaires you know that got rich of selling cheap food?
I really don't think that many people benefit from poor people in Africa, dieing of thirst, hunger and easily preventable diseases.

We are talking about maybe 3 books worth of reading with understanding. It would be hard for me to estimate it in hours, but if you spend maybe an hour everyday on average, you could probably understand the basics of programing in a year. So it depends on how much of your time you set aside for it, but I think in that at some pace it is possible to do it in under a year. There is no hurry and this knowledge is useful in the long run as well, since it is basics. But as anything in life, if you are not interested in it, programing and computers I mean, then it will be a waste of your time. Don't even try if you can't see yourself as a possible programmer one day, it takes too much time for something you won't go after in your life. A year of someone's life in not little, you probably have less then 100 of them left. So if you have a passion to understand computers, go ahead, if you are here just for quick cash, don't bother.

Apart from the mentioned benefits of a trustless and secure system, Bitcoin transactions contain scripts that define how the funds can be withdrawn. This makes Bitcoin a smart system to which you can add fetures like multisig. You can't give dollars to 2 out of 3 people You have to trust someone with a complete control of the fiat you gave them.

It is more then that. Bitcoin isn't just like a new smartphone. Bitcoin is a network. If you buy a new Iphone, you can still communicate with people that have an old Nokia and they can with you. That is because the protocol used to make calls and SMS are very old and still used today. There are better protocols, but it would make new people disconnected from the old. Same is with Bitcoin, it is a protocol, not a shiny new device. People accept Bitcoin as a payment and not other coins. If you start accepting other coins, then you will have trouble using them, since others don't accept them.

On top of that, Bitcoin has it's blockchain. That blockchain was hard to make. A lot of electricity was spent on it over the years, more then any other coin. This is what makes it most secure. This and the fact that it has been reviewed many times.

You should probably start by getting some programing experience. I guess you could learn about C first a bit. You can't really understand blockchain that well if you don't know what are linked lists and some cryptography about hashes and public keys. You need to know about assembly language a bit, to understand stacks if you wish to understand Bitcoin transactions in detail, since they are like little programs on their own (scripts to be exact).

Read some beginner books about C programing. Then read up a bit about hashes and public key cryptography. Then maybe you will need some about assembly language to understand it low level. Then the Bitcoin whitepaper I guess. And so own. But start with programing.

I wouldn't say other cryptos have an equal opportunity. Bitcoin is the first, the most accepted, most popular, most secure, most computationally and financially invested, most recognized blockchain. There is not that much space for the second. The idea of currency is that it is accepted by as many people possible and Bitcoin is it right now. It is very hard to take that and there is no real reason for people to switch. It is a simple and secure application, reviewed many times. And there are crytpos that are there from 2013 and still quite popular, but they are not even close to Bitcoin. Bitcoin was not surpassed in more then 8 years. So in near future, I really really doubt it. In long term, maybe, but I wouldn't bet on it. Bitcoin is simply good enough and it would be a huge cost for people to change it.

Only thing that is truly only accessible by you is your memory, so if you forget everything then there is no way to do it without trusting someone else.
Not to mention that you wouldn't even remember you had a wallet in the first place.
You can't not trust yourself and others at the same time, there is no one with any access to the wallet then.
If one part of the wallet is lost, all is lost. If a group of people have all the parts of the wallet, then they and only them can use it. If you are part of the group, you can't forget your part, if you are not, then you have to trust the group.

I lost many accounts due to forgetting my passwords, but there is no other way except giving someone else access or have another way of access.

You need to trust yourself and if you have a backup, for yourself or others, then figure out a place that you can always protect while you are alive. When you are dead, they can take it from you. If you are afraid that someone will kill you for it, then you need to only be able to get it by your memory.

You can't have both perfect security and perfect availability. If you care more about security, then carry full responsibility. If you care more about it not getting lost, then you have to trust someone in one way or the other.

Nobody is running Bitcoin right now. People compete for the longer chain and have economical incentive to work together, since every contribution to the longest chain is rewarded. It is the whole idea of Bitcoin. Decentralizing domain names would be an equally big idea on it's own, which is to complex to add to Bitcoin itself, if there are any good ideas in the first place on how that would be done in a decentralized manner.

Then those 10 would control the network. Bitcoin is designed for the reason that you don't need to trust anybody, here you would have to trust those 10 providers. There is no simple way of dealing with this now. You can look at Tor hidden service domains and see that they are also random, that is because that network has to be decentralized as well. Centralization isn't if you have one person in charge, it is if you have any set group in charge.

Powerful people alreadyhave ways trading anonymously, as we saw in Panama papers. Bitcoin is what wants to give that power to the people as well.
It is no surprise that government officials want to keep this power exclusive for themselves.

You can only use CPFP if you own an address bitcoins are being sent to in the first place.
So any address X sends to address Y that is owned by you and you can use CPFP.
CPFP is when that X->Y transactions is unconfirmed because it has a low fee and you make another transactions Y->Z that has high enough fee for both of them (fees depend on the transaction sizes, so you need to sum the size of both new and old transaction and make a fee on that). After that miners will deal with both transactions together, they will accept X->Y transaction and Y->Z transaction. Z can be any address, but it should be your address, since those coins from X will end up in Z.

Yes, Bitcoin Core checks if downloaded blocks are valid and that takes CPU power for checking all those transactions.
Yes, newer blocks have more transactions, so more CPU power is needed.
I am pretty sure that there is a command line option for Bitcoin Core to not verify downloaded blocks, but that is not advisable.

I am not sure what input_total column would refer to, but I think it might be the sum of coins from all the inputs in those last blocks. This would include inputs from transactions that took place after the fork as well. Only the first block after fork would have all it's inputs from transactions before the fork, the second one could already have a transaction from the previous block as an input.