You should read the previous comments, specifically by @BlackHatCoiner. This had nothing to do with internet connection, data processing, orphan blocks, "misunderstanding between nodes", etc. And it definitely has nothing to do with being decentralized since the system is working beyond fine. In fact the reason why invalid blocks like this don't create any issue is because of decentralization.

This was simply an invalid block created a miner running a customized and buggy code.

The reason for things like this happening stems from incompetence developers who do not have a deep understanding of the Bitcoin protocol and its details such as the one leading to this mistake in the customized code the miner was using to create the block they mined.
We see incompetence like this from time to time too. For example a while ago we saw blocks that had too big an OP count that surpassed the allowed number and made the block invalid. Another detail that the developer who wrote the code for that miner didn't know!

This is the guaranteed way of losing money not a trading strategy.
For starters the real traders do no share their trades with others. There is simply no reason or incentive to do so. Anybody who does, is a scammer and their incentive to share their so called strategies is somewhere else, for example a pumper who wants to artificially pump a shitcoin they are bag holding would tell others to buy that shitcoin so that they can make profit.

Besides, even in best case scenario if you could find what the expert is buying you still wouldn't be able to do in different scenarios. For example an expert may buy a shitcoin but they know when to dump it and they will act quickly. But since you have no clue what to do, you will end up bag holding and lose money.

Witness is not "separated" at all, it is still part of the transaction and like any other field (like version, locktime, etc.) it is stored and transferred as part of the transaction.

Max block size hasn't been 1 MB ever since the SegWit soft fork in 2017.

The main problem is the methods you use which can make things complicated and possibly lead to problems when you want to recover your mnemonic from the complicated backup.
For example you said "encrypt the other 12 words", what algorithm are you going to use? AES? Will you use a KDF like BIP38 to derive the password used in AES? Will you use it correctly and will it be reproducible? Will you remember how you did it so that you can recover your mnemonic in the future?
You see when you come up with your own algorithm, unlike BIP38 I mentioned, it won't be standardized so a lot of details about it could be weak, buggy or not-reproducible.

It depends on the wallet software you use. Some of them have the option to lock addresses or lock outputs (coins) manually. For example in Electrum there is the option to "freeze" addresses so that you can no longer spend from them even if you don't have enough funds in your other unfrozen addresses.

Good examples but there is a fundamental difference here. In case of all these companies we are seeing pure competition and they all continue existing side by side offering their products in a tight competing market. For example in a phone shop you see Apple, Samsung, Nokia, ... all there and you choose between them. That competition is a good thing since it forces all of these companies to keep improving and keep their product prices low.

In case of US, it was not the competition that got US to the "number 1" position in different fields. Instead it was destruction of others, some of which caused directly by US. For example the biggest help to US was World War 2 which only had one winner and it was US because US mainland was completely intact while everywhere else from Europe and Russia to Africa and Asia were destroyed. This is also what shaped the US general policy over the past 80+ years, a "grease the pol behind you" kind of policy.
This also clarifies why US sees any country that improves as a "national security threat"! Because if for example Africa regains its independence and strength, West Asia gets rid of US backed terrorists, etc. that means they will all kick the colonizers out which means all the resources US has been stealing all these years to build that "empire" will no longer be accessible to the regime for free.

You should personally review the code you find by searching otherwise it may contain bugs specially in less popular projects. Otherwise stick to popular code like like Iancoleman source code or look at the BIP page itself, they almost always have a couple of "reference implementations" listed there that are more reliable than something you can find through quick search. Link to BIP-85 page (the second link you posted can also be found here).

If you want to check if an address belongs to your wallet in Electrum, it is so much easier to just use the "hidden" search box in the Addresses tab from the UI, since it is more user friendly. All you have to do is to press Ctrl+F buttons on your keyword for it to appear.

Considering that "what month it is" has little to no effects on bitcoin market I have to say that we can't predict the price like this. However, this month we have the increasing energy price and as we get close to another Hard Winter, for the second year we are going to see increased inflation and I don't think the increasing interest rates policy can help anymore which means this time the inflation won't be accompanied by recession and as a result bitcoin price can finally start going up.

As you can see, it is a big chain of events that is affecting bitcoin market, not just the month we're in and what happened in the past!

Since BIP-85 is not popular and what you want to use it for is not used by others, the "script" you are looking for probably doesn't exist either. You should write it yourself by using the existing code in Iancoleman repository for instance.

Bitcoin is already fixing a lot of that by design. You see the reason why most of these scam methods like using card skimming devices, cloning your card, stealing your pin, etc. happen is because there is a middle man between the user (aka the owner of the funds) and the holder of the funds (ie. the bank). So the scammer comes in between as another middle man and takes the secret information during the communication between the user and the bank.

In bitcoin the owner of the funds and the holder of the funds (and keys) are the same. There is no middle man involved so nobody can use any of these methods to steal your secrets.

Then make a job! You don't have to become an employee, you can become an employer yourself. Of course it depends on your degree and your ambitions and how willing you are on taking on challenges and enduring hardship. For example do you think any of these big companies with thousands of employees (like Microsoft, Apple, etc.) were created out of thin air overnight? It took years of dedication and hard work to build the company to what it is today.

There is no reason for you not to be able to do something similar even on a tiny scale.
In fact if what you claimed was right, that means there is going to be little to no competition.

In a financial crisis you'll face higher prices (inflation) while your income isn't rising or you get fired (recession) as we've seen over the past year specially in Europe. Bitcoin can not really help either of these specially since bitcoin price itself is quite volatile and has been affected by the recession itself.
The only thing that bitcoin may help with is to provide you with some extra income, whether you are trading bitcoin or doing additional jobs to get paid in it. But the trading part is risky and the jobs are mostly low paying.

The rest of the things you said about Bitcoin are characteristics of it that are good on their own but they aren't really helping people during the financial crisis.

You are talking short term, I'm talking long term.
The ban on semiconductor exports to China will damage China in short term and they will obviously suffer (as they've already been damaged). On the other hand, in the long term the China that could freely import semiconductors is different from China that can no longer import them. This new China was forced to manufacture them domestically and so far they have had great success in acquiring the technology and producing high end semiconductors.

That means in long term they have the potential of easily overtaking the global market for semiconductors and their products.

You have to understand that what we call "high tech" is not some alien technology that was acquired by a group of people in a one time only visit from the outer space aliens
If you dedicate funds and brainpower in any sector you can reach the same technology anywhere. It's not like China is a poor country with no money, we all know China has more than enough money to invest in these sectors and reach the same tech level.

These are more like different categories rather than different theories.
When we say "exchanges" we are talking a bout many different companies, for example something like Yobit is different from Coinbase! The former is a shady business and the later is a registered and regulated company.

So it is not a "conspiracy theory" when we say some exchanges scammed their users by lying to them about being hacked. There are actual cases of this happening. There are also other cases where despite all the effort the exchange puts into securing their system, they still get hacked.

That's the point though. Those other companies also didn't leave Russia. Not willingly anyway, they were forced to leave. After all Russia a huge market for them to make large amounts of money from. The point is that if you look at a lot of these companies, they never really left Russia. They did something similar to what Binance did, they remain in the Russian market through different means like proxies or different companies.

For example the Auto Industry in Europe like in Germany stopped exporting cars directly to Russia, but they never stopped exporting to Russia! What they did was to find a third country (for example Armenia and if I'm not mistaken Georgia) to act as a proxy and exported their cars to that country which would then send them directly to Russia.

This is why my theory is that Binance (which does care about sanctions) created this "separate" business so that when US sanctions it, they are forced to only sanction Commex not Binance ergo it wouldn't affect the main business.

When you want to talk about size of transactions it is better to consider both transactions, the one creating the output and the one spending it. In this case the sum total size of the two transactions is larger when using the scripts that contain the pubkey hash instead of the public key itself (ie. P2PKH vs P2PK for example) because there is an additional hash size (20 bytes) and additional OP codes (each one byte) in the scripts.

Blaming continued losses on market conditions, emotional state, etc. is one way of looking at it, another way is to realize that your trading skills need a lot more work specially if you think you are losing because "market is consolidating".

Of course there are times when the market is not as predictable as you want it to be, but a skilled trader has enough experience to know how to make some profit from any market conditions. For example they can make profit even when the shitcoins are dumping.
Not to mention that we are talking about the cryptocurrency market, that includes altcoins which means there is always some shitcoins that are being pumped and the profit is there, waiting to be grabbed. But not for those who buy and bag hold, hoping for a long term rise.

This sounds more like Binance with another name, Commex!
If they wanted to "exit" Russia, they wouldn't just smoothly transfer all their user data to another "domain name" like this. With all the sanctions on Russia, they may want to maybe put a little distance between their main business and Russian users but at the same time not lose all that revenue.

Didn't they do a similar thing for United States? Of course the domain and the company name was similar in that case (Binance-US) under a California registered sister company called Bam Management US Holdings Inc. Whereas the original company is somewhere in Japan or Malta or Shanghai or ... lol

Ever since COVID pandemic with its recession, the predictability of the market has significantly diminished because the so called "cycles" trend was effectively broken. If you look at the chart, in 2019 we are seeing the repetition of the same 4-year cycle trend but with the pandemic starting it is stopped and then it crashes before it can turn into a full scale rally. Half of 2020 is bear market which is completely against the "projection".
Long story short, in a normal cycle price should have been half way to 6 digits already. But instead we are still stuck in $20k-$30k levels.

This is why I think the rallies will happen somewhat similar to before but the size of them are unpredictable so we can't know whether it is going to get to $200k as you mentioned in OP.

P.S. The first chart is a very interesting way of representing the cycles, thanks for sharing.