you can see that (to some extent) by checking their cold storage addresses which you can actually find in the top rich list of bitcoin addresses. there has been some panic withdrawals when this news came out which was also accompanied by a small price drop but that was all temporary and small and has been over for days now.

if you ask me this is a very good thing that is happening with Bitfinex and their Tether recently.
we have all known that Bitfinex and Tether are shady and should not be trusted but somewhere along the line people started forgetting that and instead trusted more and more in USDT to the point where some of them even hold Tether whenever their favorite altcoin is getting dumped pretty hard. incidents like this can help wake everyone up to see what Tether is and stop risking their money in it and only use it for very special cases like transferring fiat between exchanges.

1. it still doesn't make what i said wrong!
2. same as 1 although it is a very questionable decision to create msat in my opinion.
3-4-5-6. it sounds like you are saying if there is a multi-coin wallet like Jaxx for example then since that wallet supports more coins then there is no difference between those coins! when you have bitcoin in your LN channel you have bitcoin in your LN channel not litecoin or vertcoin or... if you want those you have to exchange them with someone else who wants bitcoin in return.

the  code was written for bitcoin then LTC and a dozen other small altcoins pulled the code in their client from bitcoin and activated it because they were small and had no drama like bitcoin had.

Tether has not been that stable so far either. there has been times when it got dumped, not a big amount but still a dump. but it has nothing to do with bitcoin price because bitcoin price is not set or even measured in Tether, it is instead set in USD markets and it has always been measured in USD. not to mention that if you check the volumes you can see that majority of the volume is coming from the bitcoin-fiat market not bitcoin-tether market.
Tether is mostly used for altcoin trading in altcoin exchanges mainly because people and exchanges didn't used to want to involve regulations of fiat.

it is second "layer" as in a layer that only works on top of another (main) layer which is the on chain bitcoin transactions. it is not for "many blockchains" instead it is designed and is working on top of bitcoin. but like many other things that bitcoin starts, other altcoins copy and run their own as they are doing now. that  doesn't change the fact that LN is a network built for and on top of bitcoin.

Dash and Litecoin ARE pointless with or without lightning network. Dash is a centralized premined coin that their developers have always been shady about it and litecoin is a copy of bitcoin with no innovations other than lower time between blocks and pointless algorithm change to scrypt which achieved nothing.

the real competition of bitcoin is a coin with different technology that is innovative and not just copies bitcoin. and no, in my opinion LN is not a guarantee to ensure bitcoin dominance. but you have to realize that 95% of the current coins have no innovation and are so poorly designed that they can't even begin to compete with bitcoin so bitcoin already has more than 98% dominance over the market with LN it will turn into 99%!

bitcoin core is not designed for that so as HCP said they have to write a custom script for these purposes which is basically consists of database lookups and other stuff. if you are really interested you can start searching for "open source cryptocurrency exchange engines" on the internet and then look at some of their source codes to get the general idea.
an example: https://github.com/dooglus/intersango

actually the wide scale "talks about regulation and relationship of that with adoption" is only a recent thing that mainly started in 2018. prior to that date you never saw this much enthusiasm for government intervention and restrictions on the market!!! and i believe the main reason for that is the price drops and the fact that at some point for some reasons that i don't know, people started thinking regulations is the only way the "drops" that were going on in 2018 could stop and price can reverse. so basically what these people have been and still are begging for is to get their money back which they lost because they bought into the bubble.

since others are suggesting "altcoins" i feel i have to warn you that with altcoins things can be more dangerous in some cases. for starters when it comes to a bitcoin transaction when the transaction is included in a block (has 1 confirmation) the chances of double spending drops about 99% and 3 confirmation makes it nearly impossible. the same scenario with altcoins does not exist. 1 confirmation in most of them (specially those with faster blocks and high rate of orphans) only decreases the chances of double spending from 1% to 50% depending on the coin.

the company which created Tether is the same company that created Bitfinex so basically Bitfinex owns Tether, how can they be victim of something they created themselves?!
and i somewhat agree with what you quoted, Tether has always been shady and in my opinion it is a disaster waiting to happen specially to altcoins that have been using Tether mostly for whenever they want to be traded with "fiat".

bearish trend has been over for months now, it is just that because we had more than a year of drops (the bear market) now people are having a hard time accepting its end just like many had a hard time accepting the end of the bull market by the end of 2017 and was still expecting continued rise.
and now we are right in between. this is not a bear market anymore but it still is not a bull market either. we are switching trends and that takes time. for now we will see small rises like this that take a long time and then slowly everyone accepts the change and stops expecting drops that will never happen so the rises can speed up like before.

in this case ranks make sense but generally they should not be used because ranking doesn't matter at all specially when it is based on market capitalization which is fake for majority of altcoins. in other words even of (the real) bitcoin wasn't ranked number 1 on that stupid list on that stupid website, it still wouldn't chance the fact about what the real bitcoin is.

in other words if the ranking was done correctly based on things that really matter such as utilities, adoption, processed transactions, decentralization, ... then bcash would have had a rank above 2000 so would other "top" altcoins such as ETH, XRP, DASH,...

this method is not good at all because first of all it forces you to create an unnecessary on-chain transaction and pay fees, specially nowadays that fees are shooting up again.
secondly it is not reliable since it can be faked. you have no way of knowing whether the sending address or receiving address belong to the person trying to prove ownership.

you don't exactly disclose your pubkey, not directly anyways. you only reveal your signature and  your public key can be found from that. and more importantly you can NOT call it "not safe" because it is perfectly safe, as safe as millions of translations that have been made so far. in other words just because some day ECDSA may be broken doesn't mean it is not safe today.

why should there be any?!
wikipedia is not a place to advertise businesses, and i have never seen a list of any other businesses there either so i don't know why you think such list for "bitcoin casinos" should exist! there already are many other websites that list them with feedback, ranking,... which i think is more than enough.

that is most probably the reason why you lost your coins.
storing your most important data which you should have kept secret on an online computer is bad enough, storing it on a cloud storage is even worse. and if you didn't use a strong encryption before storing it there then it was just a matter of time before they moved the coins.

newcomers MUST NOT use a website to estimate their fees. they must always choose a good wallet and trust that it gives them the best fee suggestions.
and what you call complication is a requirement because it is complicated to analyze the memory pool and come up with the appropriate fee estimation.
additionally your website is not that accurate either. it also is overestimating the fees. for instance it currently suggest 51 satoshi/vbyte takes 2 hours whereas that price is around the level where you would get a high priority transaction and get confirmed within next block (hence ~10 min) and the suggested 89 for high priority is already way too much.

also you seem to be using virtual bytes for size but limit the max to 1 MB (if i understand your tables correctly!) which is false because the maximum block weight is 4 MB.

sorry to disappoint you but what you are describing here is not a bull run specially at this point, this is a bubble you are expecting and because of that, it will not happen. the $10k in 3 months is more than 300% rise and in such a short time we can not reach it.
you are also forgetting that this current state is the INITIAL reversal stage where price slowly recovers from the 1 year long drop and market trends is switching from bear to bull. so it is bound to be slower.

haha, it was so funny bro. it is a 4% drop where price didn't even go below $5k resistance and you are panicking like this much! i suggest you stay away from bitcoin then because you will probably have a heart attack soon if you keep this up since 4% and small percentages like that are not even the "volatility' that bitcoin usually has and as we continue rising up towards the previous ATH the volatility will increase and if you are getting scared like this now you will have nightmares then.

it is not "all" green.
just like always it is bitcoin price rising while altcoins are getting dumped and at the same time since they don't get dumped in equal size to bitcoin rise (in opposite direction) their USD value looks to be rising and it deceives the observers who look at coinmarketcap.com into thinking they have been rising. but if you are a trader and are in the market you will see how the price of them is dropping.

you are not signing a message with your "address" you are signing a message with your "private key". and the process of signing a message is the exact same process as signing a transaction, you have a "message" which you hash with the same function, then find the signature using the same ECDSA function and publish the result (for bitcoin you add an extra initial byte but that is not important right now).
so technically any cryptocurrency that has a key pair (is based on asymmetric cryptography) can be used to also "sign a message" and prove ownership.

the reason why only bitcoin signed messages are accepted is because everyone has a bitcoin wallet on this forum but not everyone has an altcoin wallet. not to mention that majority of them have never bothered implementing this feature because it is not used