is it possible to make a lot of money shorting bitcoin?
of course it is, people have made money doing that.

can you do it too?
possibly not. there have been a lot of stories from people who have tried shorting bitcoin and lost a huge amount of money. just use google and you will find them. shorting is always 10 times riskier than simply buying bitcoin because if you buy bitcoin and price goes down you can just hold until it recovers and you make your money back. but if you short but price goes up you lose money period.
not to mention that you are shorting bitcoin which many consider the dumbest move because it is a coin that is on the rise most of the times.

just because someone is calling himself "real" doesn't make them real. and you, by posting his links here are giving him an undeserved attention for his trolling. and guess what he is doing with that attention? he is advertising shitcoins and ICOs!!!

that can be where BIP39[1] comes in. instead of having a master private key (xprv) you have a set of words that you can store. and since they are just words (can be in different languages not just English) you can do some creative stuff like choosing your favorite book and then choose different pages and underline the words corresponding with your seed, or simply write down the words in the book if you can't find them.
so instead of storing this
you store this:

[1] https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0039.mediawiki

you need to provide more information!
start with how exactly did you use "used replace-by-fee"?
when we say RBF you need to have set it already on your transaction before sending it, if you haven't already then you can not use RBF anymore. and if you have then using it is as simple as going to your history tab and using the bump fee option by right clicking on the unconfirmed transaction to increase its fee

are you sure you used RBF and not create a new transaction and send bitcoin twice?

when you say your balance is zero now, how much should it have been?
when you increase your fee you use your other funds to cover the fees. if you had a huge transaction but a small leftover in your wallet and increased the fee a lot you might have spent all of it. or it is possible that you had a small amount and after increasing the fee your leftover was smaller than dust limit so it was spent as fee also.

the goal of a cryptocurrency is this and their function should be as a currency. but their primary use is not at all as a currency.
bitcoin is different. bitcoin is the one and only cryptocurrency that is actually used by millions of merchants as payment and millions of dollars is changing hands this way. the rest is the traders.
but when it comes to altcoins they have no usage.

when something is a currency you can use it to "redeem" anything including gold. and intrinsic value has nothing to do with that. Franky explained it better.

bitcoin is not issued by a centralized authority but it is a legal tender in many countries.

the questions you asked have nothing to do with wanting to invest!
investing is a very different story, for that you want to make profit not use them as a currency or know their value,.... for investment you can even buy one of those "crap coins" that was mentioned above and make a lot of profit.
understanding the market is not something that can be taught in a comment though.

blockchain technology is limited to certain fields but the "development gap" that you are talking about is a lot wider than that. so the answer is no it can't close this gap but at the same time blockchain technology is its own field and those countries that are adopting it today will be 10 steps ahead of the rest of the world for a very long time. they can become the number one country in this field, don't know how things are in Africa regarding this but they have the potential.

not everyone can have their name in history for their contributions to the world. so some people decide to have their name in history as one of the biggest idiots of the century. well that is also a record. for example the Guinness World Records is not just all filled with athletes setting records in sports or scientific doing their thing. it is also filled with idiots who did idiotic things. like the longest fart believe it or not, which is 2 minutes and 42 seconds LOL. we will put the name of this hospital after this record.

first of all what OP is talking about is China banning ICOs which happened last year not this Tuesday! and ICOs have nothing to do with bitcoin price. they affect Ethereum price because it is depending 100% on ICOs existence.
secondly China has never been as big as advertised. once they had exchanges with unrealistically huge daily trading volume which seemed like they control a lot but ever since the inspections their volumes became normal and it was clear the volume was fake and they have no power.

this strategy will only work if what you are investing in has real potential of rising up. for example bitcoin has that because it has real world usages and that means its adoption will grow and with it the price will rise in long term. so it is a reasonable investment.

but when it comes to altcoins and tokens specifically things aren't as good any more. they don't have any real potential and it is all speculation about when they are going to be pumped. that means they are best for short term speculation and trading not for investment and holding.

Yobit wallets are not exactly in maintenance though. that is the word they use when they don't have the wallet on their servers or they have no coins left in their wallets. basically this is true about the majority of the coins there even if they don't say "maintenance" your assumption should be that they are disabled until proven otherwise.

it is impossible to say but one interesting thing about going down for bitcoin is that whenever price is up like when it was above $9k and it is above the certain buy support levels, the drops are extremely difficult. we saw this clearly when price was above $10k and constant dump couldn't  break it for days until they succeeded to crash the market.
but when it goes below that buy support the fall becomes easier as if the  buy support vanishes.

when you are quoting someone you should also include a link. in any case the time to sell your altcoins has been months ago when they were in their respective bubbles and were worth a lot more. now every day that passes you lose at least 5% of your investment because the altcoin dump is still ongoing. anybody can tell you with their eyes closed that you should dump your altcoins ASAP.

as for investing in bitcoin, i would wait a little more because it doesn't seem to have found the bottom price where things reverse up so buying now may lead to some regrets in near future. but even if you buy now you can be sure that soon enough price will recover and go higher than the price you bought at.

the ranking seems very wrong to me and checking their website through the cointelegraph link you posted below, it looks to me that they are basically saying Switzerland is #1 because it has ethereum foundation in it. and as for China as the worst, that is obviously wrong. there are at least 3 countries that have banned bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies and 1 (Bangladesh if i am not mistaken) which will imprison anyone who uses them. such countries are a lot more unfriendly than China that sees bitcoin as a legal thing!!!

maybe i am going to have a newborn child tomorrow and i want to put aside 1BTC in a  cold storage for his retirement when he is 60. who gives you the authority to judge these coins as lost?


why not? you don't have to worry about some possible problem in a future that isn't even in your lifetime.

i believe this line of code verifies that the signature file (the .asc) file is a signature that was created by that particular key (7F9470E6). but that is not what you want.
what you want to do instead is to check if the file (the .exe or tarball=tar.gz file) is signed with that particular key. for this you have to check the signature and the file.

p.s. it also isn't necessary to include a keyserver when downloading pubkeys, that is optional.

what i do is that i think about "what ifs" when price is rising and is at the ATH not after it stopped being there and started dropping and reached the bottom.
for instance i actually bought bitcoin at $150ish back in 2015 and i still don't mind if it drops back to $150 or even $50 for that matter because i have planned ahead. for example i sold something when price reached $700+ in 2016 just to satisfy my head and prevent myself from overthinking stuff. and when bitfinex was hacked and drama hit the market and price tanked i bought a lot more once again at $450-$500 and have been doing the same thing ever since.

in the end is till have more fiat and more bitcoin in my pocket. that's my Zen...

the answer is way too obvious that it feels silly even saying it! of course it is bitcoin.

bitcoin cash put aside all the second layer solutions and all the other solutions for scaling and even attacked them by spreading a lot of misinformation about it. their view is that the ONLY way of scaling is to increase the block size.
with that in mind, we have bitcoin that has all these solutions for scaling (SegWit, Signature aggregation, Schnorr,...) and the second layer solution (Lightning Network) and if we feel the need to increase the block size we will increase it in the future!

so on one hand we have BCH which only has 1 solution: increasing block size and has already exhausted that solution which has a lot of downsides
on the other hand we have bitcoin which has the solution that BCH used in the back pocket while other solutions are put to action.

this is just another token being created in the name of "blockchain technology" it has nothing to do with bitcoin so it has zero effects on its price. one may even consider tokens like these pointless creations and waste of time.

Jewelry related stuff that can affect bitcoin price is when the jewelers start accepting bitcoin as payment like REEDS Jewelers for instance or many others that are already accepting bitcoin payments. these increase the popularity of bitcoin and also they add to its usability which is always good for bitcoin growth.

in order to prevent Address Reuse[1] most wallets will generate a new address for you each time you want to receive a new payment or your last address was used. but that  doesn't mean you lose that previous address. it just becomes hidden so that end users don't reuse that same address by mistake. in other words you can continue using that same address as long as you understand what address reuse is. and Coinomi being a HD wallet means you have a BIP39 Mnemonic phrase which you can store and use whenever you wanted to generate ALL of your addresses and their keys using Coinomi or any other tool.

[1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Address_reuse

this is a decentralized market and everyone will at least pretend to be decentralized or aim for it. that means even if there were some sort of "regulatory committee" then majority of new projects won't participate in it and continue working without it. that means the scams will continue to exist!

the problem with scams existing has never been about regulations,... it has always been because of people's greed. they all want to make a lot of money in a short time and that helps these scammers create false promises and illusions to lure them in and take their money. for example if people stopped giving their money to ICOs then the market would have been 10 times cleaner.