no there is not because it is a closed source website as far as i can tell so only the owners of the website know what they are really doing.
all we can do is speculate. and considering genesis block's coinbase transaction is unspendable as i explained above (enforced by the network) it makes sense that this is the only case they are ignoring.
and that should not make any difference for users since that doesn't concern them!

there is no difference, GPU mining is the last step BEFORE it turns into ASIC mining. Bitmain has already released (if i am not mistaken) ETH ASIC machines.
the only difference (if we can call it that) is that GPUs are easier to come by and can be used for other stuff (like gaming!) compared to ASICs so when a PoW coin is still in its GPU mining stage, there are more average Joes mining it than when it switches to ASIC. which is what i meant by my Bitmain remark, here there is no entity to demonize, (you have to demonize big corporations like Gigabyte, MSI,... for that to work )

you have to first decide why you want to know about fake volumes?
based on your comment i think you are just mad because of other traders using bots which has nothing to do with fake volumes! and you shouldn't even care about such things as long as you have a good understanding of the market and a good strategy to go with it! your orders will be filled and you will make profit regardless of what the "bots" do! but when you make random bets on the market obviously you will have a hard time in the market.

but if it is not that then you have to clarify the reason.
for example there is a good chance that every single exchange is faking its volume but the reasons are very different. for instance a big exchange like Bitfinex is surely faking volume but they always do it for competition purposes (to stay on top of the lists compared to others) and the size of the fake is small, like adding 5% to what they already have. but a shitty exchange like Yobit is faking the volume to stay alive and the size is huge (more than 90% is fake) so you can't trust the orders that you see on their platform because they are fake. you can't sell into the top one but if you place an order below it, it will be filled immediately!

to get your answer you first have to understand how bitcoin works.
in bitcoin there is no "addresses" to be single sig or muti sig or be tied to something! an address is just an abstraction to make things easier for the end user to work with also they are human readable.

in bitcoin we only have transactions and a transaction has a part in it (the tx_out) which is creating a locking mechanism that can only be unlocked with a certain cryptographic method.
for example what you see as "normal" addresses that start with one are actually a mechanism called Pay to Pubkey Hash outputs. and to spend these transactions you have to "unlock" them you have to provide a digital signature that matches that mechanism. if you look under the hood the mechanism is this:
(signature)(public key)(duplicate public key then hash)(compare with hash that we have from previous tx)(if ok then check the signature)

the mechanism for multi signatures are the same but has additional steps
(multiple signatures)(a script which is created with multiple public keys)(duplicate previous item and hash it)(compare with hash that we have from previous tx)(if ok then check signatures)

now you can change that "script" (the second item) to anything you want. think of this whole thing as running a programming function that you are writing. when you change that script you are changing the unlocking mechanism. it can be a mechanism that requires 5 signatures from 15 keys, it can be 1 signature from 1 key, it can be a condition like a hash function that doesn't even need signatures (although this will be non-standard).
for example you can create a transaction like this:
(some arbitrary data)(duplicate the previous item and hash it with SHA1)(compare the result with the hash that we have from previous tx)(if ok then spend the funds)
[OP_DUP][OP_SHA1][OP_EQUALVERIFY]


it makes perfect sense! haven't you seen the workaroud for SegWit aka P2SWH?
what you are calling 1 of x is jut another script that instead of multiple public keys, has only one

before you start trusting Electrum, any other wallet, block explorers,... you first have to start educating yourself about bitcoin. how it works. and all the basics of it specifically the security part about how to stay safe downloading a wallet, keeping your secrets safe,...
you seem to have jumped in and as others explained are confused about a simple thing which is the new address format which is not supported in some block explorers that are lazy to upgrade their software!

because that's boring. you don't watch TV to see people in their regular lives doing regular crap, you watch TV to be entertained. and these types of story can be entertaining, to see people break the law! do what you can't do in real life, ... it is like a window to an alternate universe that you can sympathize with the protagonist.

is bitcoin itself regulated? is bitcoin itself as a decentralized currency scamming you?! but these ICOs were all scams themselves. so the fact remains that regulation or no regulation the problem is with the projects themselves not with regulation or lack thereof.
if people simply stopped throwing their money away at obvious scams called ICOs with the hope of getting a good profit while having their heads in the sand, there would have never been any cases like this.

almost everyone that you ever see talk about bitcoin positively is doing it for their own benefits otherwise why would they waste their time this much to advocate bitcoin? it is not just positive talks either those speaking negatively have other kinds of interest that they are seeking out.
the good news is no matter what they do, they are still spreading the word about bitcoin

^this without the "doubt" part. just ask for a signed message from the user to prove that the account  does really belong to them and has not changed hands in all cases. otherwise people take a break from bitcoin and bitcointalk and that break shouldn't mean all their contributions be ignored.
additionally you can accept them on a trial basis...

here is what your strategy looks like, you keep your ears to the ground and when you hear loud music you assume it is a party and then start moving towards that sound in an attempt to join the party. well by that time you either face some dude rocking his stereo or find the party is already over, and the cake is gone

that is what Google trends show you. when bitcoin has already gone up for a while the media starts hyping it up more, then the newbies start searching more about it which is when it starts showing a spike on the trends. and when the hype slows down the trend goes back to normal too which doesn't show anything about bottoming out or anything it just shows there is no longer enough searches.

and it gets worse with altcoins! for instance if they decide to spam-advertise their shitcoin, there will be a bigger "trend" on google but the price is not going up! and as their spam ends the trend also ends too but the pump and dump of that shitcoin can still continue.

both of these are bad ideas because in both cases you have absolutely no control over your funds while you will be paying fees to them for processing your stuff.
additionally there is another risk associated with your first suggestion because services like that which are associated with faucets tend to stop being profitable for their owners and run away at some point.

well that is a very rare case, nearly all the times any application that can be run on an older version of an operating system can also be run on the new versions of it because they always keep backward compatibility. i'd say it is a far fetched possibility but it is possible still.

for what it's worth ETF is only hyped up these days because price has been in a downtrend for over a year and during that downtrend people were mostly desperate and were looking for anything that could reverse that trend and ETF being in the news became that "thing" they caught and put under magnifying glass and started hyping it up.
i assure you that when the rises begin in a couple of months where price constantly has 10-20% rises every two weeks, everyone is going to forget about ETFs.

let's not forget that we in bitcoin have bitmain which has turned into the evil entity more than they really are which is part of the reason why people are (foolishly) hating miners. they don't have such thing in Ethereum which is additionally because ether miners are GPU miners not ASIC farms.
i honestly don't know what kind of crap they are pulling with this slow multi step fork thing but unless they have a way of killing the PoW mining, it will exist. obviously its price will fall dramatically but not because "people" dump it, not at all. it will be because the ethereum foundation will use their premine coins to dump the PoW coin just like they did with ETC. (just search about times poloniex caught them red handed manipulating ETC price when the fork initially happened and closed some of their accounts).

it is all about momentum and the initial "getting out of this stage" part. when that happens there is no more resistance that is unbreakable anymore. when we get to $5k-$6k that would be considered about a 100% rise from the bottom and by then the money would be pouring in much easier and faster, and more importantly with a bigger confidence than investors currently have. which means a bigger buying strength that can easily eat through these supposed resistances.

that is correct because servers have nothing to do with your seed and deriving private keys from your seed. everything is happening inside your software which will be usable forever and even if you couldn't or didn't want to use the Electrum version you could always ask someone who is familiar with Electrum code to write you a simple script that you then run offline to generate your keys from your seed. (it is an easy thing to write). that is the beauty of open source applications.
then you can use the private keys (which are universal and work in any bitcoin implementation) to import in another wallet and have access to your funds.

it is simply because blockonomics website backend has decided to exclude the one and only transaction that is technically the first transaction that is the genesis block's coinbase transaction which is worth 50BTC and also is unspendable and is ignored even if you had the key to 1A1zP... address and tried spending that transaction output. so it is showing the balance of that address minus the 50BTC and it has received 16.92683950BTC in the past 10 years for some reason!

technically speaking (ignoring the drama) there is no difference between the two. both of them are centralized websites that are owned and controlled by certain people. it just happens that the philosophy of the owners of bitcoin.org's and its contents are much closer to bitcoin and its decentralization compared to bitcoin.com's specially since they are advertising something that was created without consensus (BCH) as bitcoin!
and maybe that is a good thing! maybe it can help some people realize that they need to trust the decentralized protocol instead of trusting in what some website tells them...

that is what i said!
but in the part i quoted, you are saying "bitcoin was not flawless" which means the protocol. which in my opinion is a false statement.


that is exactly why i tried to make that distinction. i don't know how clear my comment was but i tried!

you are already correct, things like that are impossible with bitcoin because the protocol is strong and has no bugs, exploits, workarounds,... (hint some altcoins do have all these in their protocol!) and that makes bitcoin strong. but implementations will always have bugs like that. and they are not as bad as a protocol problem. why? because for example if that #1 was indeed exploited it would have split the network into two: 1. those who were running a buggy implementation (certain versions of core) 2. those who were running an implementation without the bug (other versions of bitcoin core and other full node implementation). all the while the protocol is working fine and bitcoin continues as it should on the right chain.

there has always been only one method of earning bitcoin and there will always be only one method!
just like any other currency that one method is to work and get paid in bitcoin. there will always be thousands of different jobs you could do though which will always depend on your skills and sometimes on whether or not you are willing to make an initial investment for example in case of mining (which is a work you do) you have to make an initial investment to buy equipment.

in short if you look at bitcoin just as you look at any other currency (like USD) then all your questions are going to be answered automatically. but when you see bitcoin as something strange and unlike currencies then you would be confused.