There is a difference between CoinJoin the protocol and the implementation of this protocol. We know the benefits of CoinJoin, we also know the danger of using the malicious implementation of CoinJoin called Wasabi that is in cahoots with anti-privacy organizations.

It's like ECDSA. We know the algorithm itself is safe however there were implementations that were broken and leaked the private key when user signed their transaction.

Decimals are only used in the User Interface to show the value to the user in different ways. Otherwise as far as the protocol and consensus rules are concerned there is no decimal values used anywhere. Every number in Bitcoin is an integer (a whole number) of different size, most are 32 bit (like version and locktime), some are variable size (like script lengths), we have a couple of 256 bit integers (used in difficulty) and the only 64 bit integers we have are the "amounts" field in the outputs of each transaction.

It's been a rough and long journey though. Reversing a downward spiral that lasted about 2 centuries is always expensive. We have a saying that they took a whale turned it into a pussycat (current map of Iran looks like a cat); that is the occupation/separation of 2.6 million km² from Iran between 1812 to 1970 starting from Caucasus to Iran's 14th province called Bahrain.
It took roughly 15 years from 1964 to 1979 to stop that downfall and start the reversal through a bloody revolution, then it took almost 5 decades in post revolution Iran to get to here with an 8 years of "hot" war (armed conflict) and 44 years of cold and hybrid war to get to here.

This is also another indication of the weakening United States. It is not just the POTUS who is a senile old man, he is the literal manifestation of a regime that used to be a superpower.

That is not possible, there will always be stronger countries and weaker countries. There simply can never be equality, just like in society. I don't think this has ever happened in history either.

But the good news is that unlike the past 32 years the world will no longer have a single super power that abuses that power. In the new World Order there multiple poles of power. It is also not just US versus Russia fighting for a bigger "piece of the cake". As you said there is also China that is growing and has become a super power. But that is not the end, there are more countries that have built a strong status for themselves.

Take India for example. That's basically a continent of its own with a large population and fast growing economy. India is also expected to basically replace China in terms of GDP growth rate in the following decade which is why United States also considers India a threat! lol

Another example would be Iran, a country with a battle hardened economy that despite having experienced high inflation for many years (due to the record number of sanctions) still had a bigger GDP growth (4.7%) compared to US (0.9) and EU (1. in the last quarter of 2022 according to the World Bank which is expected to reach 5.6% by the end of 2023. Add to that the biggest amount of energy (oil+gas+lithium), numerous industries (traditional and high tech), one of the most advanced militaries and literary the biggest military alliance spread across the globe and you got yourself another super power.

With organizations such as BRICS we are going to see more power poles show up. I'd say Brazil is the next candidate.

Nobody likes any of them. They have a bad history specially US and Russia with all their wars, invasions and genocides. Interestingly enough most of the world also feels the same way about the New World Order (multipolar world). In fact a couple of months ago I was reading what one of those thinktanks in Washington had published about their fears of dedollarisation and in there they argued that rules of majority of the countries in the world see the New World Order as an opportunity to become stronger. And today we are seeing that happening specially in Africa as more nations fight for liberation.

I don't think the risk of such investment is as high as you'd think. At the end of the day there are still cities and people and there are infrastructures they need. It doesn't matter who rules over those cities and people, they will still need the money to rebuild! Even if it is Russia that in the end takes control of those cities, they'll need foreign investors to rebuild anything they'd destroyed, which is where jackals like BlackRock come in to fill their own pockets.

Unfortunately Decentralized Finance is one of those cool ideas that the shitcoin called ethereum has taken over and have already ruined it. So for now it is associated with creating completely useless shittokens and scamming people using the shitplatform known as ethereum!!!
I don't see anything changing as long as token creating platforms aren't being developed seriously in a truly decentralized way.

BTW this is not the first over-hyped mechanism they've used to revive ETH price though. They keep changing the name of the scamming method and continue their ways: ICO, IDO, IBO, IEO, ITO, STO, DeFi, NFT are the existing ones, each deader than the other.

The only part of your post I disagree with is this.
Diversification in my books is when you buy "assets" that are not related to each other. Meaning if one dumped the others won't follow. We all know that this is not true about altcoins, each time bitcoin makes a move they get dumped. That makes them terrible for diversification.

Not putting all the eggs in one basket in my opinion should be investing in bitcoin then in things like gold, stocks, real estate, etc. that aren't linked to bitcoin or vice versa.

Referring to altcoins as "assets" makes no sense since at best they are a worse version of penny stocks which are garbage stocks from garbage companies 99% of which have no future whatsoever. Altcoins are the same, majority of them are absolutely useless and they are all created for pump and dumps which are risky to get involved in.

In any case, during the "bull cycles" if anyone wants to touch altcoins they should firs prepare themselves for the concept of pumps and dumps otherwise they will be dumped on and become bag-holders. It is of paramount importance to know when to sell altcoins and how to do it quickly.

This is why we always suggest newcomers to stick to bitcoin alone.

If we use the second method of creating the Taproot address (explained here) then no we can't know the public key that was used, we only see the "tweaked" public key.

In asymmetric cryptography the public key needs to be public! otherwise the algorithm is useless.

ChatGPT is not suitable to answer anything technical. A simple Google search would give you better results in most cases.
In this case you are correct, by having the Tweaked pubkey alone we can not reverse it to get the original pubkey because the last step is adding two pubkeys which is not reversible (pub_tweak = pub + (t * G)).

For cases like this, it is best and easiest to use some JSON library that would create the string itself instead of trying to hardcode it yourself. In that case you just create your "array" with the addresses and amounts and simply call the ToString method to get the result you want to pass to the commandline. That should take care of all the quotes, brackets, etc. needed for a correct value.

Technically Iran wasn't a member but even more technically there was first Iran then came BRICS

One of the main reasons for creating BRICS was to challenge the dominance of US dollar and US. That means creation of new payment systems, new trade routes and relations that US can not dictate or prevent, creating a sanction proof economy, etc. Well, Iran as the most sanctions country for the longest time in history has already created all that. Iran already has sanction-proof payment systems, trade routes and partners, and a lot more.

I may be biased but to be honest the way I see it is that BRICS without Iran didn't mean much. Specially when you consider the historical role Iran (or Persia) played in the global economic scene for centuries connecting East and West by being at the heart of Silk Road, and it still is at the heart of the new Silk Road under the new name One Road One Belt.

All Taproot addresses are always encoding a 32 byte data called the "witness program" that is always an x-only public key whether it is a single pubkey address like I explained above or if it is using the script spending route with a TapScript.
To put simply there no longer is hashing involved like P2PKH, P2WPKH, etc addresses.

That's only the encoding part though. It doesn't have the code to Tweak public keys to create the address.

Over the years we've had so many ETF related news (hype) that got shot down by SEC rejecting them that at this point when people hear any news about another ETF proposal they are ignoring it. So I think at this point it is going to be like meh, meh, meh, meh, ... holy shit one got approved and bitcoin is shooting to the moon

Jokes aside I still think ETF is terrible for the "decentralized" bitcoin but we also know there are loads of idiots who like to put their money where they can't control. So it looks "lucrative" for them not by nature and consequently it can help the bull run get started.

As for $150k I think it is too much of a lowball, if we start the rally and go beyond the previous ATH and specially if we enter the 6 digits range (ie. going beyond 100k) we can expect a situation similar to the last month of 2017 when price suddenly went from $8k to $20k which is a 150% rise in short time.

There really isn't any point in topics like this where OP tries to explain (copy paste) information about basic things in Bitcoin!

There are a couple of reasons why altcoins choose PoS or move to PoS, none of which have anything to do with criticism or energy consumption or anything like that.
Two major reasons is the fact that altcoins that lack popularity will not be able to get anybody to mine them, ergo they will have low hashrate which would make them vulnerable to attacks. Choosing PoS which is a flawed and primitive algorithm that doesn't require any actual work means they can get network participants to "process" transactions with virtually no cost and avoid the PoW related attacks due to lack of interest.
The other reason is to make money out of thin air which we usually see in altcoins with premines like ethereum. The premine bagholders simply sit back and enjoy the free money they "print" out of thin air and with virtually no cost.

This is fine as long as you work in the same language like OP but when you go to another language, extra care must be taken during the translation. The behavior could be different or misinterpreted and you end up with bugs... (speaking from experience )

It's really funny to see the type of weird views some people have of the world and the things that are happening in it. OP basically says that "because US supposedly owns a lot of gold, creation of an alternative payment system is impossible". It is even funnier when you look at the name of this forum and realize that it is a Bitcoin forum, a place where we discuss "an alternative payment system" called Bitcoin that is not backed by anything like gold and it was created and it is successful and every day it is growing
By the way United States doesn't like Bitcoin either.

In any case, dedollarisation is happening whether some people or even US itself accepts it or not. It didn't start last year and it won't mature soon but it is happening.

It occurs exactly every 210,000 blocks not approximately.

Capped supply has nothing to do with mining difficulty at least not directly. The number of miners or more precisely hashrate is the only reason determining difficulty

No!

You got it right here. Did you copy this whole text from two different places that it has this contradiction inside?!

Exactly and in fact this is one of the most important characteristics of Bitcoin that sets it apart from majority of altcoins.

You should seriously try to educate yourself more about how the world works.
From day one of every invasion of any country in the world in the past decades, such companies from different countries have always been the first there during the initial phase of the invasion to struck loads of deals for the day that the war eventually ends. This is regardless of who is going to win the war or for how long it is going to last.

Take the invasion of Iraq by United States in early 2000's. As a matter of fact the invasion had economical reasons including investments (to rebuild the infrastructure US destroyed!). So from day one as US was bombing the Iraqi infrastructure (from people's homes to factories and farms) these American companies were the first in Iraq making deals for the future!

If we want to dot all the i's and cross all the t's a transaction looks like the image below.



The left side is one without witness and the right side is one with 3 inputs two of which have witness (the first and the last) with the middle one being legacy (no witness).
The empty boxes are 0x00 in the serialized transaction.
The boxes with doted lines aren't a separate field in the serialized transaction, they are there to indicate what the group is.