Once all the mindless speculation stops and things are built correctly, using something efficient, like Taproot Assets, I'm still fairly confident there is genuine utility to be found.  The only reason people are writing it off is because it's currently poorly implemented and because unscrupulous people are using it for blatant profiteering to sell the digital equivalent of magic beans to gullible suckers.  

I don't see Ordinals as "lucrative" (as per OP) in any way, unless you're the type of person (not you personally, nutildah, but in general) who somehow still sleeps at night knowing they've taken advantage of someone.  If they are used properly as a tool to represent real-world assets like financial documents, deeds, wills, etc, then that would be a world in which I can accept Ordinals.  Until then, however, it's a sleazy, underhanded crap-fest, much like ICOs, forkcoins and other the other speculative-bubble-abuses that have occurred previously.  I want no part of that.

All what was written about fees is correct, but just for record (and maybe for novice users):

Blocks are "mined" by miners which do some calculations based on the given difficulty set for some period of time. Difficulty is adjusted every 2000 blocks, just to have the average performance 1 block every 10 minutes. But, it is average speed, it does not mean transaction will be processed in max 10 minutes. Unfortunately we cannot tell when next block will be mined. For example in the current "evaluation period" we are statistically 20 blocks late and soon difficulty will be decreased by +- 1%.

As a consequence, you should be aware that it is possible to wait a long time for block and fee does not change anything. The risk is that if block is very late (it happens that we have 30, 40 minutes or 1h without block), fee which was sufficient 1 h ago, is not sufficient now, as your transaction will be removed from the 1st expected block as other users prepared lot of transactions with much higher fee. I skip talking about low-fee transactions purged from mempool as we talk about high fees.

An interesting Electrum server is also Fulcrum which has been discussed in some other thread(s) here on this forum, e.g. here https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5441463 and also compared with other Electrum server implementations e.g. here https://www.sparrowwallet.com/docs/server-performance.html.

I use Fulcrum on my RaspiBlitz node as replacement for electrs because I got tired of the issues that electrs has sometimes with addresses that have a huge transaction history. For my personal Electrum wallets I don't need Fulcrum, electrs would be fine. When I do sometimes a bit of blockchain digging I've run into such issues from time to time with electrs. Fulcrum is easier to configure to server huge address histories and it's refreshingly fast with data retrieval compared to electrs.

Linux and Windows executables are available from the Github, MacOS executables are announced but not yet there. You can always check the code and compile your executable yourself. I don't mind that the main dev appears to be in the BCH camp, the project is open-source and works very well for Bitcoin.

Almost all CEXs use trading bots to create liquidity, maintain it and for many other things. Therefore, the use of bots in this field is old, and artificial intelligence may come to improve results or speed up the execution of tasks. Since you are looking for a bot that works with AI, all you need is that be AI prediction mechanism.

This is an open source code with which you can get price forecasts of bitcoin prices using AI https://github.com/albert-espin/bitcoin-prediction
what you have to do now is link these outputs to any of the traditional trading bots, and you will have a fully automated AI trading bot. As I mentioned, the role of artificial intelligence here is to predict Bitcoin prices only. You will find more projects here https://github.com/topics/bitcoin-prediction

Spam will always be an issue. No matter what limit will be set, block creators will always reach it. Set 1 MB as Satoshi did, and it will be reached. Set 4 MB as Segwit creators did, and you will also see fully filled blocks.

If you are a block creator, then you have an incentive to create the biggest possible block. Why? Because then, you can pick some simple, deterministic algorithm, and generate terabytes of always valid transactions on-the-fly, then let your miners work on that header, and send mined block to other nodes. Then, you can start producing some next block, on top of what you created, while other block creators will try to validate what you submitted.

Instead of thinking about block size alone, think about verification time. If blocks are produced every 10 minutes, but your blocks are so complex, that it takes 5 minutes to verify them, then guess what: other block creators have 5 minutes of "guessing time": you already know, if your block is valid or not. But others don't, and they have to decide, if they want to create the next block on top of not-yet-checked-block.

There's only one way to fully validate the current utxo set and that is by downloading the entire blockchain from the genesis block. if someone wants to trust some third party then  i guess that's up to them but internet speeds and storage space seem like they will able to support blockchain growth perhaps indefinitely since technology is always improving and we already have 20+TB drives.

That's about a 40:1 ratio of unused to used space. You can bet that's going to get bigger in the future. people can already have a 1Gbps internet speed. That should be sufficient far into the future for downloading the blockchain. Blockchain grows at 0.1TB per year max, it takes how many years to fill up a 20TB HDD? In 100 years the blockchain will be at most about 10TB. On a 1Gbps connection you can download that in just over 1 day. In 100 years, 1Gbps probably will be something everyone has. No one is still on dialup. The day when you can't download and fully validate the blockchain from the genesys block if you so desire is the day that bitcoin becomes meaningless. Because you won't know if it goes all the way back to satoshi or not.

Yes, you cannot do "public key recovery", because:

1. The way how signatures are made, makes it hard to do it in the same way as for pre-Taproot addresses. If you have some output with a script "<signature> OP_SWAP OP_CHECKSIG", it works for pre-Taproot public keys, but it cannot be done for Schnorr signatures.
2. You don't need to recover any key, because Taproot address is used to encode your compressed public key directly, and it is automatically assumed that it has "02" prefix.
3. If you have more than one party, then after aggregation you only know the public key for the combined signature, you don't know which public keys are used in the middle, because if you know that the result is "10", then you don't know if it was "2+8" or maybe "3+7", or even "2+3+5".

It is not possible to actually 'seal a private key'. First of all, it is basically impossible to safely create pre-funded collectibles (safe as in: the creator has no access to the private key). The method Leo mentioned, allows you to make user-funded collectibles safely, but that kills the coin's collectible value, as now the user who funded it, can scam a future owner of the physical coin.

In my opinion, for substantial amounts and as technology advances / gets cheaper, hardware-wallet-inspired collectibles should be considered.
For instance, it is today possible to build a device which uses an open-source 'avalanche' circuit to generate entropy and private keys and store them in a secure chip, which even the creator cannot extract, although he has hardware access to the device. The device would be able to display a Bitcoin address, though, and destruction would be necessary to spend the funds. This is all possible and mostly how a hardware wallet works (only really changing the way the secure element grants you signing access), but those aren't exactly cheap, so this is the one drawback.

The "developer tax" (a mandatory fee which is either taken from transaction fees or from block rewards, and goes to the developers) you mention is implemented in various altcoins already, also in some which were initially not premined (for example PIVX).

Such a developer tax, if it's mandatory, can however lead to problems which impact in the competitive situation:

- If it's taken from transaction fees, then adoption can be harmed, because the coin would then be more expensive to transact than competitors.
- If it's taken from block rewards, then it's simply additional inflation, which does not bring more security (like increased mining or staking rewards would do) but only dilutes the coin supply.

There are however also models which don't have these problems. For example, in Signum (originally Burst), some big pools agreed to pay regularly a small fee to fund development activities and nodes which are always online. As this is completely voluntary, it's similar to a donation and thus does not impact decentralization at all. If problems for the competitive situation arise, the "tax" can simply be reduced or eliminated completely.

And thanks to Al Gore and his financial cronies, said coal power plant no doubt purchases carbon credits so on paper they are 'low CO2 emissions'.  
That particular setup is also an outlier. Mines are setup where there is:
a. Abundant low cost power.
b. Friendly local governments.

Regarding 'a', the massive amounts of power the largest farms use is there because there is not enough local loads to run the power plants at maximum efficiency and it cannot be economically be sent across 'the grid(s)' to be used elsewhere. The farms that were once located in the Pacific Northwest existed because of the large hydroelectric dams that were built to power several massive aluminum refining plants all mostly owned by Alcoa. When those plants were shut down during the 90's & early 2k's the utilities needed a huge 'local' load to justify operations. When miners and data farms moved in everyone was happy. Finally around 2013 Canada established a high-tension link between the Northwest and their grid to buy power from the dams who now had a market willing to pay more for that power. That more than anything is what drove PUC to all but shut down large mining farms... In that case, also 'b' was not present.

These days the same supply/demand economics apply. Yes Texas has massive wind farms and guess what - they produce far more power than is usually needed to feed the all but isolated Texas power grid ran by ERCOT. It has only 2 ties to the rest of the national grid system and they are pretty limited in how much power can be sent through them. Now in their case the overcapacity was purposely built to accommodate local weather conditions and the amount of power produced & needed in the local areas. When there are poor winds in one area odds are they are good in enough other areas to cover it. That said, the end result is usually far more power than Texas can use.

Enter mining farms. Most folks have at least heard of the deals that ERCOT and the mega farms in Texas have: The farms get to soak up the excess power at reasonable rates but with 1 caveat - whenever circumstances require it (most often weather) the farms have to throttle back their power usage and even stop running entirely until things change. So much for 'the power usage harming other users'...

Yes ERCOT pays the farms a stipend for not running but it is a fraction of what the mines would earn if running plus that diverted power is still being used/bought. Still, given how easy it is to switch a mine on & off vs any other type of mega power hungry industry to free up that power to be sent where it is needed more, not a bad deal. ERCOT gets to build up their safety net of over-capacity knowing they have a line of buyers waiting to get some of that (conditional) excess power. Win-win for all involved.