you don't understand how mining works and you also don't understand what illegally abusing other people's computing power means!

more miners doesn't mean faster transactions, and less doesn't mean slower. difficulty will adjust in PoW algorithms so that it takes the same amount of time to find a block.
as for abusing, you are not allowed to use other people's computing power without their knowledge and that is what these sites are doing, it is like running a malicious code on your computer.

if you can not analyze the market and bitcoin price yourself, following someone else won't help you either. and even if you wanted to see some real analysis the best place is tradingview.com not Youtube and certainly not these shitty pump and dump channels which pretend they are "analyzing"....

unless that application is open source and its code is reviewed i wouldn't suggest using it.

terrible idea.
searching these terms will actually bring up the shittiest results on Youtube!

only coindesk is half decent among the news sites, the rest of them are either copy pasting news or posting bullshit poorly researched articles which are focused on click baiting viewers.

this is very true and it works but at the same time there are two very serious problems with this strategy.

1. it only works for very small amounts of money. you already mentioned this but it is not really a common thing for people to want to transfer less than $10 around and as the amount grows, exchanging your funds into another  coin and then exchanging them back on the other exchange will cost you 2 big fees which can be a lot bigger than your bitcoin withdrawal fee in many exchanges!

2. the price volatility and price spread in the altcoins. one problem is the volatility meaning you buy one altcoin at lets say 100 satoshi and when you transfer and want to sell price of it can droop to 90 satoshi and you lose a lot more than the withdrawal fee you were trying to avoid. the other thing is the spread. for example you buy from the lowest ask which is at 100 satoshi and in the other exchange you sell to the highest bid which is 90 satoshi and you lose a lot of money that way. and sometimes this spread is huge specially in small altcoins and in small exchanges.

exchanges aren't "collecting" data, they are producing date.
the price, volume, ... are the history of what has happened on their platform when people made trades with each other filling orders, etc.

maybe if you explain what you are planning to do with this "data" it can become clearer where and how you can obtain it.

it is mainly a way of distributing the supply!
it can be a token based on another platform with an ICO, or it can be a full cryptocurrency with a stand alone blockchain.

for example ByteBall is a 100% premine altcoin, so in order to give these coins out to people (distribute the supply) they asked everyone to link their bitcoin addresses with their Byteball address and they paid each with proportional amount of Byteball as an "Airdrop".
same with ICOs, they make certain amount of tokens, then they ask people to join by linking their Twitter, Facebook,... or joining on bitcointalk,... and then pay them proportional amounts of their tokens.

it is basically giving away free money that is why it is popular these days!

as far as my knowledge goes, a bear market is where the prices are dropping at least for the most part so it is best to sell instead of buying.
but when looking at bitcoin charts, ever since the bottom was reached thanks to the massive dump at $5900ish we are seeing downs AND ups at the same time which you may call sideways. price goes above $10k then falls below it to go back above it again. rinse and repeat.

i am still not convinced about this news saying this single person crashed the market because a lot of things don't make sense to me.

first of all his purpose was not to crash the market because he did not benefit from any kind of crash.
think about it, the news tells us he was selling to have money to pay others.... in other words he didn't want the price to drop so he can buy more bitcoin, he wanted the price to go up and stay up so he could get more money out. someone with this motivation doesn't crash the market and will do everything in his power to prevent that as a matter of fact.

secondly, i say unless he was selling on all exchanges he couldn't have caused any kind of crash whatsoever because simply put if you dump on one exchange price may go down there but it won't follow on all exchanges. and as i explained above you don't just go around and fuck the market up to cause yourself a lot of loss.

third, the news also told us he started selling months ago. and if i am not mistaken when i checked the date versus the price, bitcoin price was around $4000 when the news said he started selling. this means price was $4000 he sold, it went to $5000 then $6000 and so on and he was selling, it went above $10000 he was selling, it went to $20000 and he was selling,... so are we ignoring all these sales during the biggest rise of last year and still say he caused the crash?

and finally people who want to sell a lot of bitcoin and get the money while not paying taxes and get stuck in exchanges and pay huge ridiculous fees, and a lot of headaches, they don't use exchanges. they go elsewhere and make their trades behind closed doors and when you trade anywhere but exchanges you don't affect the price at all.

private key is simply a 256 bit number is a huge range that is selected randomly. it is from 0x1 to 0xFFFF FFFF FFFF FFFF FFFF FFFF FFFF FFFE BAAE DCE6 AF48 A03B BFD2 5E8C D036 4140.
when you generate a new address in your wallet (online or offline) what happens is that your wallet software randomly chooses a number in this range and that is your private key then uses some math to get the public key and then your address from that number. and this "math" is a one way street. meaning you get the public key from private key but you can not do the opposite. same with address. and that is the relationship.

example:
1. private key (number)
your wallet, for convenience shows this to you in a special format called Base58

2. public key which is a coordinate on the Elliptic curve (y^2 = x^3 + ax + b)

3. address which is SHA256 + RIPMED160
again for convenience the same Base58 encoding is used here too:

ref: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Technical_background_of_version_1_Bitcoin_addresses

it is pretty simple actually!
i have never introduced bitcoin as an investment to anyone to this day. if i tell others about bitcoin, i am going to tell them "bitcoin is a decentralized currency", expand on that and finally maybe i tell them how the price of it works based on its limited supply and growing demand.
this simply solves all the problems of them wanting to invest only to get rich over night and then with a small price drop they panic,...

only weak hands have uncertainty and because of that they panic sell. the rest of the market specially the whales are enjoying things and are accumulating more bitcoin each time price takes a dive like that.
that is somewhat the nature of this this market. and although it is not 100% certain but you can see the trend that bitcoin is on. i usually call these drops as "shakeouts" because that is what happens in reality, they manipulate and panic sellers are shaken out of the market.

since there is no information on this anywhere and YOU, a random dude, is the only person saying this, i am going to call it just another abuse of Satoshi Nakamoto name. something similar to what Craig Scammer Wright did last year.

i didn't know it is still higher but it has been higher nearly all of 2017.
and the reason for that was because India was somewhat cut from the rest of the world because of their banking system so no bitcoin went in the country to be sold to fiat because fiat could not exit there so the bitcoin supply stayed lower while the demand for bitcoin (thanks to government shenanigans) have been rising more and more every day, so the price went a lot higher over there.

i don't think we can say it has failed, it can still be true with a little difference.
it is about FUD and panic sells that keep on happening but are unpredictable for bitcoin. this is not a normal slow drop, it is a sudden unloading of a lot of bitcoin on market to push the price down, followed by a lot of panic sells.
we have the Binance hack plus the news about some Tokyo Whale selling more than $400 Million worth of bitcoin and still selling. neither have anything to do with the price but it is effective as it seems. and with perfect timing...

it is 16.9 million

that is something that you will never know. you can make guesses all you want but they will always remain guesses.

then would you mind explaining the purpose of this topic?

it has nothing to do with how much how many people hold. it is about the price. the same people who are holding large sums of bitcoin have been doing it for years. majority of them have bought bitcoin or mined it back when price of it was extremely low, like lower than $100.
it is hard only if they are not willing or capable of paying the price for bitcoin as its price is rising so now it is going to cost a lot more to own 100 bitcoins than it would have cost last year or the year before that and so on. and it is going to continue being like this and it will become harder just because price is rising not because some people may or may not hold large amounts of bitcoin!

and if any one of them decided to sell at some point, it will simply be absorbed by the market.

whenever there is a new version out, you can always go to the Release Note file on Electrum's github repository here: https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/blob/master/RELEASE-NOTES and see what has been changed.
unless it is a serious buy/vulnerability fix (like 3.0.4 and 3.0.5) there is no rush in updating to the new version right away specially if you are not using Electrum to send bitcoin out every single day.
but remember that new versions are always improving the wallet software and most of them are fixing some small bugs which you may encounter if you stick to the older version still.

you said it yourself
nothing, and that means literary nothing is 100% foolproof. even bitcoin isn't. maybe some day people could find a way to reverse ECDSA and when you put your public key on the blockchain inside of your transaction they could figure out your private key in reverse. (it is not possible and the math says it won't happen but you know...).

so in the end it all comes down to risk management in my opinion.
this, for me, means how much i am willing to risk in that particular thing. for example how much money i am willing to invest in bitcoin. then how much of that bitcoin i am willing to put in my hot wallet, in my hardware wallet, in a paper wallet, in my exchange account for trading, in an altcoin, ...

i think any bank in any country would be wise to be at least a little bit worried about bitcoin. bitcoin is a potential competition after all. but also bitcoin can be a very good opportunity for everyone including the banks. for example so far the biggest usage of bitcoin has been to invest in it and that means a lot of money transactions to and from banks so that people can buy/sell bitcoin on exchanges. not to mention that in the future banks can offer same savings accounts and other services they have with fiat, for bitcoin too.

this just means you have no understood the cryptocurrency market well enough yet. you need to watch the market and see how it moves some more and try to analyze why it moves like that!
from your second comment i can tell that you invest in altcoins and do it without knowledge of them. you are currently gambling not investing nor trading. you should change your strategy from gambling to trading. which means buying  coins only if you speculate that they are going up not hope they will go up.

we are talking about 600 computers not a handful of them! stealing parts at a time means months of stealing to get that much out.
not to mention that we are talking about computers that are working day and night and should continue to work, you can not take out a part of a computer or even one whole one and nobody notices anything is missing.

just because price goes down, it doesn't mean it is a bubble popping! a bubble is when price is so much higher than the intrinsic value and then it drops hard. like the $20k and the drop to $10k. not a 10% drop that in bitcoin is considered normal fluctuations!

and just because you saw a drop it doesn't mean we are in a bear market. this here is more of a sideways action than a bear or bull market. price is going up and down between two prices of $9k and $12k and until it breaks either one of these lines it is going to continue being a sideways action.