i still don't understand why people think "bitcoin" miners redirected their mining power to these altcoins! BCH already had a big mining power coming from Antpool and Bitcoin.com and it remained that way. while SV needed to get power which CSW provided but not from bitcoin.
additionally if you check the hashrate charts you can see that when the fork occurred there has been no hashrate change for bitcoin. but after the price dropped the hashrate went down, and only a little which is logical since lower price == lower profit and not all miners can continue mining under those circumstances. and mining BCH and SV have been even less profitable (you lose money if you mine SV) so i doubt anybody bothered with it.

i believe this confusion is another one of the common confusions that is caused by  looking at top levels of bitcoin instead "under the hood". like satoshi being the real unit and being UInt64 versus bitcoin being the top level unit and being a Decimal.

under the hood, there is no such thing as "satoshi/byte". the transaction only has satoshis that is the value you are transferring. this value can be anything from 0 up to the maximum value you are spending which depends on the previous output. so the resulting satoshi/byte which is defined on top level by the wallets, can be anything like 0 to 0.0001, 0.001, 0.1, 1, 2, 10, 1000, ....

145 bytes if i am not mistaken.

yes, with price and the cumulative fees. remember blocks don't contain 1 tx. they contain many and sum of all the fees can be a decent amount in that future.

apart from 3 and 6 which are the same thing, i disagree with everything else. none of them can affect bitcoin price. for example black Friday and Christmas are not things that make people sell their investments in something as valuable as bitcoin just to get money to spend! they may spend bitcoin but that doesn't affect the price due to high liquidity compared to number of places accepting bitcoin.

it can not be because of ICOs because first of all people bought ETH to invest in ICOs, not so much as BTC. so if anything ETH price went up because of them not bitcoin's. secondly the ICO mania died a long time ago near the beginning of this year. the death didn't start this week to cause any drops and ICO owners were dumping in early days. and again they are dumping their ETH and also tokens for ETH and cashing that out not bitcoin so if anything again ETH price drop is due to ICOs not bitcoin's!

you have to ask this question from those who panic sold...
i am just posting my observation/speculation.

if you want to call:
- going from being worthless ($0) to $4000+ in less than 10 years
- having a trading volume of $4-$5 billion per day
- handling 200k-300k transactions per day
- transferring about $1 billion worth of transactions per day globally
- being accepted by thousands of merchants around the globe
- introducing one of the biggest technologies that is being used by banks, governments, and a lot of financial institutes
and a lot more...
as "end very badly" then you are right. it ended very badly

some people have always been FUDing and some other people have always been Hyping bitcoin. these days that price is making a move the both groups are actively at work! although it is surprising to me that you have only seen the hype since with a quick look at this board or on some news sites you can see that the majority of the posts are negatively FUDing bitcoin.

as for being "over hyped", the answer is no. the hype w as over about 9 months ago when the bubble burst and the price corrected itself by dropping more than 60% and the majority of hyped up newbies with weak hands who wanted to become rich overnight left the market.

now bitcoin is under-valued.

there are a lot of problems with using bitcoin.
first and foremost, the laws regarding bitcoin are not clear yet. they said "a team" is investigating and the talks were mostly positive but there has not been any actual law legalizing bitcoin or not.

then there is the fact that there aren't any decent exchanges where you can trade bitcoin! your option is P2P trading with high risks. and as you already know sanctions mean you can't use your bank account to deposit on exchanges such as kraken, coinbase, bitstamp,...

and as always we have the high volatility of bitcoin which turns everyone around. even when the local fiat is tanking, despite bitcoin drop the value of it stayed nearly the same in IRR!

my guess is that we will soon see an Iranian version of cryptocurrency similar to Petro since there has also been talks about it and they mentioned the project is on its way. i doubt it can solve anything or be remotely successful but i think that is the rout that is going to be taken.

this sounds somewhat like my story
i started from faucets too! it is so silly now that i think about it since it was a waste of time. my first ever bitcoin that i received was about 11k satoshi worth less than $0.05! i continued accumulating through different jobs. micro payments at first then bigger and i then started trading. slowly at first to learn things. i remember trading on Cex.io because by that time (2014ish) they didn't have any minimum trade size and i was trading with 1-10 Doge at a time because i had so little money and i didn't want to risk at all. price was somewhere around 70 satoshi IIRC. and that was the beginning of my trading journey and i continued trying to increase my experience and understanding of the altcoin pump and dump market for better profit.

this was true at some point in the past where there weren't that many exchanges. like back in 2013 where there was Mt Gox which controlled more than 85% of the volume and then there were other exchanges which had 1-5% of the volume. so they could control the price.
nowadays the biggest exchanges only control less than 10% of the volume. you can not "manipulate price" by  that much control over the market!

however this is still true in altcoin markets. because there are exchanges that control near 99% of the volume of some altcoin and the rest are only arbitrage chances so they can manipulate altcoin prices that easy. whether they do it or not is another discussion that we may never know the real answer to.

"price" being manipulated has nothing to do with bitcoin being a decentralized currency which is giving freedom and control to its users.
"price" relates to trading and exchanges, which are centralized, small and manipulated. that is an undesirable fact but not a secret. and it is not ALL manipulation. it is also like this because of the smallness of the market. when a big panic sell occurs the price crashes hard because exchanges aren't trusted places where people feel safe to leave open orders which requires leaving money on exchanges. not having open orders means the order books are not packed and a small sell can result in a big drop.

they don't seem to be address of any sorts, at least they don't follow any kind of conventional encoding that i have seen. is it some sort of puzzle you are trying to solve or something?

in any case all 3 strings are encoded using Base58 with a 4 byte checksum. the decoded results are each 21 bytes and the first or last bytes are not similar, if they were you could have said it is an appended version byte and the remaining 20 bytes could have been the result of a hash160 which is not the case here.

if you explain where you got these from, maybe we can help you better.

FWIW, something that can have a simple solution is not a problem. when you see 1542862977 we all agree that it represents "Thursday, November 22, 2018 5:02:57 AM". but also we can all agree that it represents "Thursday, November 22, 2118 5:02:57 AM". in other words a simple condition can fix the problem:
5.1 mil is the approximate number of blocks in 88 years from now (in 2106)

apart from what was said about the fact that the purpose of bitcoin is not to help you hide but to take control back, it can also be partly because bitcoin itself is the innovation that led to other stuff. in other words bitcoin's creation was the reason why anon coins like Monero were created and sometimes you have to take the steps one at a time not jump over them. not to mention that these anon coins are not perfect. they have flaws that are not desirable for a payment system such as bitcoin.

bitcoin has problems but it still is a damn good decentralized currency. in other words the benefits and positive sides of bitcoin are a lot more than the problems. that means any problem (which are small ones by the way) are acceptable. as a result bitcoin will remain useful and "relevant".

as for alternatives, so far we have not seen anything that can come close to be useful. they are improving indeed but their problems are much bigger that in their case the problems overshadow the benefits.

isn't it already without fee when you use fiat? so why would they use bitcoin?!!

no, people won't be using something they acquire hard to pay for stuff when they can use fiat.

bribes will continue to happen using fiat with or without a bitcoin ban because it is the most convenient and most anonymous way.

that has nothing to do with a ban!!! they can do it anytime they want. and i still argue that the fees for this kind of conversion is still higher than using fiats.

of course Craig isn't selling bitcoin to crash the market. he doesn't have enough BTC to put a dent in the price. but he doesn't have to sell to cause the crash. the FUD does it for him.
it is like the exchange hacks. for example when bitfinex was hacked in 2016 the hacker did NOT sell the hacked coins on the market! others did! and that caused the drop.

or maybe the dump was the reason for the delay?

they may be aware of the hype they have created and want to see the price rise. if something like that is released during a downtrend it can not change anything but if it is released during a rise or when the market is getting ready for the rise (like when it was stable at $6k+) release of it can lead to a rally...

if you want your code to run on multiple platforms and not just be for windows then you have to write it using .Net core and avoid anything that is windows focused (e.g. WPF is only for windows, .Net framework is only for windows,...).
my suggestion is to use .Net standard library project type for your libraries and for your GUI you can use Avalonia[1] which is a WPF like GUI that works on multiple platforms.
and good luck.

https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia

you want us to believe that a mining farm that is still making the same amount of bitcoin started making more $$$ profit so they decided to sell more?!! that doesn't make any sense. if anything when miners make more profit they either continue to sell the same amount or sell less because they don't have to. so technically price should have gone up instead.

don't forget that majority of miners (specially big farms) never sell their coins on exchanges. they do it off the market and that never affects the price.

first of all you get a transaction ID when you sign a transaction. it has nothing to do with broadcasting and being in a queue.
second, this "queue" that you are talking about is the mempool and if your tx is in it that means you have already broadcast it and it is out there!

basically this is the steps you take:
1. fill in the information to create a tx (amount, receiving address, fee)
2. sign the transaction and get a tx id
3. broadcast the signed tx
4. receive a message telling you what happened. if it was successful it will show you the tx id again and if it failed it will show you a message containing the reason for failure. if the message indicated success then it means your transaction is already in the queue aka mempool.