this is exactly what i always tell people when they start comparing bitcoin with altcoins, specially with big ones like ethereum. with a quick look at bitcoin history you can see that bitcoin success did not require any kind of premine by the developer! no ICO fundraising crap! no mass media advertisement, spams,... to fool people into buying it!
while bitcoin was created to solve problems in monetary systems and offer a decentralized payment system, but 90% of the altcoins nowadays are only starting to give money to their developers and nothing else. this is why the altcoin devs feel the need to run a fundraising and call it ICO, IEO, STO,... even they know their coin has no usage or future. that is why they want to get the money up front!

size of the blockchain is a problem but it is not the biggest problem we have specially since we have cheap storage nowadays with high capacity and we also have option to prune the blockchain. the bigger problem is the time it takes to verify these blocks, as they get bigger they will contain a lot more sigops which need to be run and verified. we have had improvements in speed with SegWit and will have a huge improvement with Schnorr that can help so i don't think we need to wait 10 years to be able to handle bigger sizes. we already can handle 4 MB blocks! and if we want bitcoin adoption to grow and not become obsolete we need to scale.


by the way the problem with UTXO set has nothing to do with block size that OP is talking about, UTXO set can grow even if block size was 0.5 MB since it is the "Unspent Transaction Outputs".

people have always been so curious and sometimes hyped up about Satoshi and have always wanted to know more about this mysterious and anonymous entity so partly is understandable to see so many topics and questions rise discussing different things. but at times like this there is some drama in the social media (in this case with scammer known as Craig Wright who is pulling an identity fraud) there is more interest in discussing about Satoshi so we keep seeing new topics pop up!

there is always interest in trading softwares because there is a lack of good ones around. but that does not mean any new thing that comes out people would rush to use it because we are talking about their money and it is very risky to use any new software that comes out from a random person who has no history so can not be trusted.
it also depends on the software itself. is it open source? does it provide any actually good features or is it just an illusion with a lot of bugs and bad scripts/strategies?

one view over the market is that we are always in a bullish phase since if you look at the past 10 years history (long term) of bitcoin you can see that price has been rising from first day to this day and all the drops in between are negligible corrections and they mainly happen due to the bubbles that slow down the rise.

this is the "bitcoin" bull run and only "bitcoin" price is rising not tokens! in fact most of these tokens that people are bag holding are not going to even exist in a year from now let alone give any profit to their bag holders.

something that some random dude said on Twitter is hardly a reliable source to quote here as a legitimate statement. most of them don't have any idea what they are talking about including this one. Wash trading and a lot of other shenanigans exist in this market like any other market and many exchanges report fake volumes but first of all the numbers are nowhere near what are claimed and secondly we have no way of measuring the true values and know the real volume versus fake one.

please note that non-HD wallets aren't unsafe, it is just that HD wallets are safer because you only have to rely on your RNG once when you create the seed. but with non-HD wallets each time you want to create a new private key, you have to call the RNG again and that is not desirable.
as for why people use it, as TryNinja said it is for convenience and lack of knowledge.

well that has nothing to do with bitcoin and i don't see the connection between that and CW!
GoldCoin will have a hard fork where they add a lot of new features which they copy from another project (in this case from bitcoin) then the new chain after the fork is going to be the official GoldCoin chain! as it is with any fork.
that medium article is intentionally using certain terminology and is advertising it in a way to hype their altcoin up but in the end it is still an altcoin that is copying bitcoin code. there are at least 50 of them that have done the exact same thing from the most popular one LTC and BCH down to less known ones like BTX.

if you are talking about "extending" your seed with additional 3 words then it is there to give you the opportunity to have 1 seed (the 12 words) but derive a different set of keys by having a "password" on top of it. they usually refer to it as plausible deniability. i personally don't know why it would be used though.

they changed their name from blockchain.info to blockchain.com and it is a web wallet.
if you are worried then do it with a small amount to test things out, then spend that amount from your Electrum wallet too to be sure.
to test your Electrum setup you can also use TestNet mode. although you need to be extra careful in the future not to mix things up (like confusing the TestNet seed with your main wallet seed).
for example you can create a TestNet wallet, claim free (worthless) TestNet coins which are exactly like bitcoin from a faucet, receive this amount in your wallet then spend it (send back to the faucet) to see how things work.

use cold storage if you want to be safe. Mac, Linux,... aren't giving you the safety you require.
this may answer your follow up questions too, using a portable hard disk.
disconnect your network physically, plug in the disk, install a fresh OS (Linux would work best here). change its setting so that it never connects to the internet. add necessary encryption (setting login password, user file encryption, disabling guest login,...) install Electrum (that you downloaded and verified before) add a strong password to that too. now this is your cold storage. never connect it to internet ever.
read more on how to send coins: http://docs.electrum.org/en/latest/coldstorage.html

nowadays in the cryptocurrency market there are lots of shitcoins that use Telegram because it is easy to advertise their junk to newbies who follow them and create bots that spam it for them automatically. it is also easy to censor it and a lot more that helps all of these pumps, ICO scams,... do their filthy work and reach a very large number of people at once. that is why it has become popular at least in this space.

that is not a "cool article" that is a very low quality text written on a click bait website with a different title to hide the fact that it is repeating the oldest question that has been asked and answered in a much better manner that this "text" is doing thousands of times before. it is basically repeating "What Happens When the Last Bitcoin is Mined", if you search that term you will find countless better things to read if you are really interested in this question!
and if it is your own site that you are advertising then maybe it is time you thought about other ways of making money!

you need to be a lot clearer about that! what you said here doesn't make any sense and the only information that i could find about "Reverse Bitcoin Hardfork" is a GoldCoin related thing (link: https://www.goldcoin.org/fork_faq.html) where since it is a copy of bitcoin they are basically pulling changes from bitcoin to their own fork and adding them there which has nothing to do with bitcoin.

If someday we "upgrade" bitcoin i don't think it would be to a bigger size curve (which the bigger keys come from) but i suppose it would be a migration to another different asymmetric cryptography algorithm instead of elliptic curve and keep it small at possibly the same 256 bit key size.

although you'll never know with bitcoin but i don't think we can break $10k this soon, it could probably take a while with at least a couple of tries and fails to break it and go to $11k all of a sudden.

up to this point was the result of the "reverse bubble" burst in my opinion. as i said before, price was in an unstable and artificial low and now it is "bursting" in reverse to go back to the normal stage. with $8k we are just back to where we should have been in January-February if the manipulation hadn't happen.

splitting something into smaller portions doesn't change its supply. imagine you have a bar of gold and you break it in half, you didn't increase the supply of gold you just broke it into smaller components. so when speaking of supply you really can't talk about divisibility.
also on-chain is the important part which will have 1 satoshi as its smallest unit.

it is worth adding that these may not cover all cases and it may not be true in all cases either.
for example bitcoin core is a deterministic wallet but it does not use mnemonic so there is no 12/24/... words to back up, only a seed that the user won't see in GUI. (i think point 3 is the only thing that works in this case)
or some web wallets like Blockchain.info used to have a "recovery phrase" while they weren't deterministic at the time. it looked like a mnemonic but it was for something entirely different.

if they go the altcoin route (which may be it like what Samsung did) it is going to be a lot easier for them because the full nodes of altcoins have tiny blockchains compared to bitcoin and also they don't have that much "traffic" either, usually their blocks are either empty or little used.

i still lean towards a slower price rise from $7500 to $10000 and this recent price rise is not changing that yet. remember that it was not a big rise either since it was only a 6% rise and a rise that occurred after breaking a resistance at a psychological round number where day traders place automatically triggered buy orders.

it is not a "decade", it is 34 years for the elliptic curve cryptography (from 1985 for ECDSA) and 18 years for the hash function used in bitcoin (from 2001 for SHA256). bitcoin is just built on top of these and there is no "bitcoin code" there is only "Bitcoin protocol".