Although the possibility of mining pools spamming the network is not zero but it is not that common because the mining pool doesn't receive the fees even if they don't let the rest of the network see the spam transactions and mine them all themselves. The fee is paid to the miners based on their share of the hashrate. In other words this is a very costly attack for the pool.

BTW you can't just find spam by looking at the raw fee in dollar paid by transactions. Actual blockchain analysis is needed.

Yeah, that's kind of an old trick where you predict more than one outcome and only refer to the one that came true. A more clever way is to fit them into one prediction instead of separate ones by creating a complicated statement that can be interpreted either way

Technically these things are "pump and dump" groups not signal groups and usually their main purpose is to get some shitcoins they had bought before, pumped so that THEY can sell and make profit. There used to be some of them active on this forum with specific topics giving "signals". Here is the oldest one I could remember and find: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=765426.0 you can see how he used to scam people specially with his shill accounts.

I say stay away from them altogether instead of trying to go in and not be fooled.

That's true and maybe I should have tried to find a better example that falls under the same category but the point is that there are cases where the developers would want to restrict what the "regular" users of their tools can do. Sometimes it is to prevent them from losing funds, sometimes it is to prevent them from doing something pointless.
A good example in the category of this topic would be your wallet preventing you from paying an extremely high fee like 1BTC even though it is perfectly fine to do so.

Maybe but I believe there is always a third option like a nationalist option that can manage to gather everyone or at least the majority under a singular flag. I'm not familiar enough with Ukrainian culture to say what it is, but there is always something everywhere. Sometimes it is ideology whether one of those "isms" or religion, sometimes it is economy, sometimes just nationalism, etc.

Your question is too broad to answer because it depends on the decision, the government or group of people, the time frame and a lot of other factors. It is not one reason the derives all and it definitely is not always power and money.
For example from the little explanation you gave it sounds like you are in a region of conflict like Keshmir; almost all the conflicts in West Asia (our neighborhood) is the result of the past 300 years of colonizers meddling in our region and seeking their own interests. Otherwise before that for thousands of years we never had this kind of conflicts at this scale with these many complications and radicalism.

It is worth knowing that when it comes to cryptocurrencies as a whole, market capitalization is kind of a meaningless number because of the way it is being calculated which is supply*price.
You see unlike stocks where the "supply" is the actual number of shares that are owned by actual stockholders, in cryptocurrencies the "supply" doesn't have to be real or in circulation. It is any supply like the premined coins that never enter circulation or any coin that the centralized authority of a centralized altcoin can print out of thin air at any moment if they wish to without releasing them to the public.

So when we talk about market cap, it makes sense for bitcoin because the bitcoin supply is all real and was entered into circulation as the reward for the work that was done by miners. However when you are talking about it in a comparing scenario and you get altcoins involved things start falling apart. For example the altcoin with the biggest market cap has 72 million premine and at this point it is being printed out of thin air artificially inflating its market cap.

With the above explanation you can understand how what you are referring to as "dominance" is a falsehood and is actually market cap ratio or a battle of supplies.

Wallets and even public APIs must always be a lot more restrictive than the consensus rules. An example would be the fact that you can't create SegWit addresses using uncompressed public keys that easily using any wallet or library even though they are perfectly fine as far as the consensus rules are concerned.

Keep in mind that having an entirely separate computer is not the only way to create an airgapped wallet. You can either use live Linux OS where you install and run the wallet each time recovering your wallet using the seed phrase you have written on a piece of paper; or you can just install the Linux OS on a bootable removable media like a USB disk to have persistence and store the wallet between restarts.
This old topic explains the second type for example: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=853288.0

"want" can not be some abstract idea in a decentralized ledger. It must be explicitly expressed through voting and any proposal that requires/enforces a fork like BIP16, BIP148, BIP341, etc. must be activated after checking those votes. BIP148 does NOT do that!

In other words whether or not the majority wanted SegWit is irrelevant since BIP148 did not even care about that which is what leads to chain-splits!

[1] peer
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gossip_protocol
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-key_cryptography
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symmetric-key_algorithm
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_Encryption_Scheme
[6] https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/blob/7012d998f1acef8692cc673586a622bbb4f86c05/electrum/ecc.py#L344

Jokes aside PayPal does own a considerable percentage of the global online payment options and if some day it ceased to exist the shops and businesses using their service have to find an alternative which is where Bitcoin comes in and can take it all. That means PP's demise is a good news for bitcoin

I don't think it is what they predict, rather it is what they hope for.
At times like this when the price hasn't had any big move (up or down) the traders start getting antsy because they can no longer make profit and most importantly they can't predict the next move. Their best bet is for bitcoin to drop, specially those who love shorting bitcoin. Hence their negative waves talking about "dump"; they are just trying to make some quick profit.

LOL

I'm getting 2017 flashbacks where some people said "BTC to $1k will never happen again".

Directly? Absolutely not. Because PayPal is an actual exchange where people trade bitcoin to have an effect on the price. It also doesn't share enough of the market volume to have any effect even if it were an actual exchange!
Indirectly? Maybe, if these idiots' FUD could scare some other idiots into panic selling but so far I haven't seen any major moves so the chances are low.

bitcoin.org is a simple mirror of the bitcoin core releases that sometimes updates with a delay. Topics like this on this forum are also announcements that can also be delayed.
The direct link to check for updates on bitcoin core project are bitcoincore.org website (the first link in OP) or the https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin repository that contains the source code.

The abstract idea of nodes voicing their preference is a good one with merit but BIP148 is not and it is instead a dangerous proposal because of a simple fact that it disregards majority. It simply has no way of checking or caring what the majority says, whether it is 1% or 99% it will enforce the change!

In any change, regardless of what it is, we must reach consensus amongst network participants otherwise it goes against the idea of being decentralized.

The good (and I suppose also bad) thing about trading cryptocurrencies is that you can enter the market so easily and with so little amount of money. For example a lot of altcoin exchanges have a small 20k satoshi trading limit and there have been some with smaller 1000 satoshi trading limit!
That means anybody who wants to learn and become a professional in trading can start very easily and with the least amount of money at risk.
But at the same time people tend to get cocky when they make a couple of good "bets" specially during the bull seasons like 2017 when anything chosen blindly would have given you profit. That can lead to increasing the investment at the time when the losses are kicking in like 2018 till today where altcoins have been dumping.

Bottom line is that in my opinion if you want to make an investment just buy bitcoin (using DCA) and avoid everything else and if you want to trade, altcoin market is good for short term profits but make sure to start slow and don't suddenly go big.
As for the percentage of income, there is no rule that fits everyone. It depends on how much money you can spare and how much risk you want to take.

That's never a valid argument if you ask me. For one, we have had Gavin Andresen and Mike Hearn were also core developers once and they both went nutz and made questionable moves and statements. One supporting faketoshi and the other spreading FUD about bitcoin...

Exactly. It is interesting that not so long ago most topics involving stablecoins were about their scam nature because the centralized companies issuing them nonstop had never shown any proof of funds. They just keep printing tokens out of thin air! But these days people seem to have either forgotten that or have ignored it completely.

The problem is in centralization of these things.
All stable coins are centralized one way or another, not to mention that they practically have their hand in your pocket and can freeze your money at any time they want: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5204055.0
It's the same with shitcoins like ethereum. It also is centralized and with all the other vulnerabilities in its protocol and the reversible blockchain it has, makes it a very risky project as a whole with a shaky future at best.

Dollar isn't rising, like any other unlimited fiat that keeps being printed, dollar is also dumping (evident from the high inflation in United States).
What you are possibly referring to is your local fiat dumping faster than dollar (hence the exchange rate going down). In which case converting your fiat to bitcoin for as long as your fiat is dumping could be a good opportunity. Of course your should first educate yourself about Bitcoin, wallets, etc. so that you just don't lose what you bought!

Technically the community did not split. There are loads of altcoins like bcash that have copied both bitcoin code and blockchain creating a forked copy of bitcoin called something like like bitcoin gold, bitcoin silver, bitcoin cash, bitcoin diamond, etc.
These are always a minority or rather a handful of people that create such altcoins and are not "splitting" the community. The only difference bcash has is that it has been so much "louder" than the rest of them!

The only reason why Blackrock has been making the headlines is that they, as "businessmen" trying to maximize their profit, have been trying to leave United States and take their capital (or at least a big chunk of it) to China and United States government (with all its liberal crap) is trying to prevent them from doing so like any other dictatorship.
Which means there is a struggle between the two and I don't think US can afford limiting BlackRock or damaging their revenue because it will ruin US economy. That also means it won't affect their investment in anything bitcoin related, ergo there is nothing for us to be concerned about.

As for the rest (hiring devs and starting hash wars) there is not enough incentive to do so. They want to make as much money as they can not create chaos and possibly damage their own capital.