well all i can say to that is that some day (not even so long ago) if you told people that bitcoin is going to be worth $3000 they would have told you, "it is impossible, you are dreaming" but it went up to $20k! you see it is not about the size of that number, that value is just in your perspective that looks big or small. you should look at the bigger picture. not to mention that you are looking at the value of 1.00000000 BTC instead of looking at the value of smaller units. and comparing that with market capitalization! which doesn't even make sense because you are comparing apples and oranges.

first of all your problem had absolutely nothing to do with libsecp256k1, you didn't need to download that. the message you saw is just informing you that you don't have that optional library so Electrum is going to use the python library that it has always used which is slower since it is written in python compared to libsecp256k1 which is in C.

secondly you are confusing the button's purposes. you are correct that the docs page is outdated though. with current versions we have two buttons: Save and Export
Save button: is used to save the signed transactions in your wallet without broadcasting it. aka saving it locally in your wallet file.
Export button: which is on the left side alongside the QR button, is used to export signed or unsigned transactions.

so in that last step, instead of clicking save, click one of the other buttons depending on what you want to do:
Copy: to copy the hex in your clipboard and then paste it anywhere you like
QR: to see the QR code and be able to save,...
Export: to get a .txn file so that you can transfer that file to your cold storage and sign.

if you want to run "ismine()" command in your console you need to use single quotes to pass the address string in it like this:
it does the same thing as your GUI though where you pressed ctrl+f in your address tab.

as for your problem, have you checked whether you have another wallet? click File > Open and see if you have another wallet file stored, maybe this address was from that one.
additionally see if you have a clipboard hijacker! maybe you copied the correct address but it changed it. if you copy another address, will it remain the same in your memory when you paste it?
try this address for example copy then paste to see if it changes.

true, but in this particular case 2FA was not preventing this man from stealing user's cryptocurrencies. he just chose those accounts without 2FA because it was more convincing to lie and say they were hacked compared to saying an account with 2FA was hacked!
the moral of this story is not to trust any exchange with your money. the coins are in their database and no matter what password and 2FA you choose they can still rob you.

as figment said, this is "pruning". it already exists and you can also do anything else as you like as long as it is on the individual client sides, there is nothing stopping you from "restarting" anything. but blockchain is an immutable ledger and should always remain intact. because of that no matter how big it gets we need to have it stored somewhere, preferably on thousands of nodes all around the world to keep the network decentralized.


speaking of mass adoption, the average Joe is never going to run a full node whether it is 10 GB or 100 GB. they will use custodian wallets, web wallets, and SPV clients for ease of use so that they don't have to get involved with any kind of complications.

there is nothing wrong with centralization, that is part of the world and we currently are using a ton of centralized things in our lives (banks and fiat, Visa, Paypal,...). as long as they don't advertise their coins with a lie as a decentralized one, i can see successful centralized cryptocurrencies.

the problem is that signature verification in elliptic curve cryptography is not done with the "address"! it is done with the public key. so what happens under the hood is that when you give Electrum your signature to verify, it recovers your public key but then it doesn't know what to do with that public key since your address starts with a "3".
i think you need to open up a new issue on Electrum repository, since your first byte here is an unusual "36" that has to be an indication that this address starting with a 3 is a SegWit address so that it lets your wallet know what to do with that public key it just recovered.

that is a dangerous way of thinking.
there are no 100% secure applications. there is always going to be some exploits in every code without an exception. it has been like this for as long as computer programming existed. thinking there is no more issues with Electrum or thinking there is no issues with other wallets is going to result in carelessness and losses.

by "hide" i mainly meant in the basic areas such as where you see your balance or history,... where regular users go to. the "coin control" page and other options like that are considered like advanced options and it should still remain there with a note.

regarding the "notes" additional column, there is already a column called "label" which is basically the same as a comment section where you include some extra description. i don't think there is any need for a new one.

you have to be careful who you call "experts"! most of those whom you see online spreading bullshit pretending to be "experts" are either idiots trying to make buck or actual experts that are spreading misinformation to make millions.

as for ETF, i think at some point in the past people disagreed about whether it is going to be approved or not but now they all agree that it is not going to be approved anytime soon as we have all seen how SEC rejects all of them and is not planning on changing their course.
as for the "bull run" since the market is ready i'd say if an ETF was approved it may help start the bull run unlike before when market wasn't ready so its effects could not be anticipated.

keep your shirt one bro

trust me, when "it" is happening, you wouldn't have time to come here and post about it. this was just a small preview of what is in store in the near future. that rise is going to be fast and big and will most probably break through the $4k resistance in a blinking of an eye.
specially now that there are a lot of greedy newbies waiting for the drop to lower prices, that guarantees a sharp rise as they start FOMO buying as they miss out cheap prices.

wallets like Exodus are only good if you are planning on storing altcoins alongside your bitcoin all in one place. otherwise there are many bitcoin wallets that are much better than it and have been around for a much longer time so they are more tested and less risky.
just remember not to fall for any youtube advertisement to get hyped up and become an altcoin bag holder because someone was promising you riches.

there is a huge difference between daily fluctuations and a bull run. what you see here is the daily flucatuations not a bull run. a bull run is when price of bitcoin reaches $5000 at least not when it is only rising less than 10% and is still below the major resistance at $4k.

all the rest of the altcoins you see rising are just the market responding to the USD value equivalent going up otherwise if you check the altcoin BTC value which is the important one you can see they did not change at all.

you can't mix an extended key with a normal private key and get a multi signature address. a multi sig is created by mixing the private keys themselves. so to create a 2 of 3 key you need to give your function 3 private keys or define a new function yourself that takes an extended key, derives n keys from it and then mixes it with the single keys (m-n) keys that you additionally give it and returns the multi signature address for you.

in my opinion it is mainly because there is a lot of controversy circling the wallet softwares that do alert users of new versions. so developers decide not to include such features in their software.

in any case, you are in a decentralized world using a decentralized currency with open source/free software. it is your own responsibility to follow their vulnerabilities, shortcomings,... and learn how to increase your own security as much as possible. nobody is going to take your hand and do it for you.

using a different wallet is never going to solve your security concerns.
you and everyone else have to start following certain security concepts in order to remain safe. two of the most important ones are usage of cold storage and learning how to verify PGP signatures 1 and 2.
for example if you download wasabi wallet and still don't verify its signature with the valid PGP public key you are still not increasing your security!

in my opinion higher fees will kill bitcoin so if block size scarcity is enforced in the future*, remember that bitcoin was meant to be a decentralized currency not something people only trade or store value in so they don't care if they pay a high fee to transfer it. it may also nullify what you are saying since people would stop using bitcoin and consequently the price would drop and there wouldn't be any more profit for them miners anymore.
bigger capacity also means more transactions, and that means more transaction fees in total.

* note that i am saying in the future, as of today and in the close future we don't need block size increase or even fees to replace the block reward since it is quite high still and will remain high for many years.

according to the bounties page on the i2p website, there was a bounty for someone to create such a project and someone already claimed it. i don't know how far along is the project or when it started though. you can check it out here: https://geti2p.net/en/get-involved/bounties/btc-client

block size does not harm decentralization, how block size is increased can do that. for example if you increase it suddenly to a much bigger number now it will end up centralizing bitcoin but if it is increased slowly with the advancement of hardware and internet speed then it can't do much harm.

the most important thing to remember is that size of the blockchain is only one of the problems. the bigger problems is the hardware limitations. if we have 10 MB blocks for example you will have to verify 10 MB worth of transactions every 10 minutes on average and also be able to receive and send that much every 10 minutes. additionally miners will start facing problems, specially those with slower internet speeds who have to compete with those with high speed connections and that leads to miner centralization.
so the numbers you are reciting above (13.33kb/s, etc) are only when you assume people download 1 block per 10 minute but that doesn't make any sense. not for miners not for others. and it is not just downloading blocks, a node does a lot of other things that takes traffic including relaying transactions in its mempool

when you compare things with the ATH it obviously looks like decreasing. it is like saying bitcoin price is decreasing because it came down from $20k instead of looking at the bigger picture that it has increased from $0 to $3k+ in a short time.
the payment processors are actually seeing an increase in their usage but when you compare it with the ATH which has always been also the ATH of payments, it obviously looks like decreasing.
as for the adoption, it is not something that stops. it is always ongoing but since the price is not moving the media doesn't cover it much and consequently people don't hear about it. for example did you even know that a US state recently adopted bitcoin as a legal currency?