I'm not aware that Core uses Dandelion or that it was ever formally adopted. Bitcoin Core shouldn't be sending the addresses or any identifiable information to any other node anyways. Wasabi's primary privacy doesn't stem from it's enforcement of Tor but rather how it behaves as an SPV client.
Actually, here's one thing I don't get. Why do you need to add another output if you want to just send the transaction to yourself? It would simply lead to a larger transaction size and a much larger fee. If you want to "Cancel" your transaction, simply send the UTXOs used in that transaction to yourself and there isn't any need to add another UTXO. People would probably add UTXOs if they're trying to ensure that the output is of a specific size. Any MITM will result in the an adversary knowing that the transaction was broadcasted from that specific IP.

You'll have to do it yourself outside of the console. Bitcoin Core only displays the public key that corresponds to the address. There's no need for Bitcoin Core to display different versions of the address as it won't serve much purpose other than causing more confusion. It's not too difficult to do so.

It's more like a game theory in a sense. To reverse a transaction that is included in a block within a blockchain that is X blocks deep, an attacker has to build another blockchain from the block before that and include another transaction that is spending the same coins but is sent to another address instead. Now, since nodes only accept the blockchain with the largest PoW, the attacker has to effectively outpace the rest of the network and be able to mine X + 1 block. Remember that the rest of the network is also mining at the same time and lengthening the blockchain. As such, it is both prohibitively expensive as well as unprofitable to do so.

Consensus is an important aspect with any distributed systems. The concept is difficult to explain if you don't understand the workings of Bitcoin. It'll be great if you could skim through the whitepaper and clarify if you don't understand anything.

https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

Nodes will always want to follow the chain with the largest proof of work. By doing so, it ensures that an attacker cannot broadcast a different chain with a significantly lower Proof Of Work (ie. Much lesser efforts) that replaces the transactions in the chain with the largest PoW.

Timestamps are not followed strictly within Bitcoin and there is a fairly big deviation allowed from the median time. I'm not really sure what you mean by tracing the divergence or how it'll help in this case?

Edit: Satoshi actually explained the gist of how the network works in his white paper. I think your confusion lies within how the network functions rather than on PoW itself.

Nope. Proof Of Work is essential in making Bitcoin work in the first place. It acts as a consensus mechanism among nodes to decide which are the transactions to be accepting and considered as valid. It builds the blockchain and provides security to the transactions that are included in the blocks; as the confirmation increases, so does the security as it is the amount of work that an adversary has to do in order to reverse those blocks.

Without a system like that, someone can just broadcast two different transactions spending the same coins. Which transaction should the node then consider to be valid? How does every node on the network consider that transaction valid and not the other transaction? In Bitcoin, transactions are thus included in blocks and the nodes will always follow the blockchain with the largest cumulative proof of work. This ensures that the same coins are never spent twice and all of the nodes will recognize the same set of transactions as valid.

Perhaps, it can be better. It still fulfilled its primary purpose to help you get a confirmation within X blocks. I'd rather them overestimate the fees at times rather than underestimating them. Imagine taking the estimate for 2 blocks and it ends up taking a few hours for most of the time if it takes a more conservative estimate.

If the server can't give you the correct mempool estimation, then it isn't reliable to be used as a server. You might not even see your own unconfirmed transaction if the server is that inaccurate. There is a fairly decent allowable margin of error for mempool estimations and not seeing a few transactions should be fine. Comparing the mempool of my nodes, there is only a slight discrepancy of roughly about ~1% with the transactions at a lower fee rate. Higher fees transactions are generally fairly well propagated so that's really not an issue.

But it is a valid point of course.

Paper is from 7 years ago. The paper highlights the risk of sybil attack over Tor and poisoning by exit nodes which isn't possible if you're only use onion nodes which doesn't route the traffic through exit nodes. I'm not sure why people keeps on citing it.
What wallet are you using? It would be far better for you to do a single connection to your full node if you're using an SPV wallet. Most SPV wallets are not great at preserving privacy. If your wallet is using bloom filters, you need to configure your node for it as well.

If it's a wallet.dat file or something similar, then Dave from walletrecoveryservices would probably be your best bet. You won't have to send over the entire file but just the relevant data of the password.

There is no such thing as a wrong estimation, unless you're telling me that your transaction doesn't get a confirmation within the ETA. Would it be bad to be overpaying for fees if you're almost always going to get a confirmation within the timeframe as stated (within X blocks)? Probably not. Overpaying for your fees is just a feature of Electrum's (and Bitcoin Core's) fees estimation system.

Is there really a need to go to various sources for just the mempool stats? I mean there is bound to be deviation from various different mempool but its somewhat consistent as long as you're aiming for the top few MB or so. Electrum's mempool estimation (within 0.5vMB, etc) is accurate enough and checking mempool sites would give you roughly the same results, probably easier than reading graphs or navigating around the other sites.

It's actually quite dependent on your wallet as well actually. If you're using wallets like Bitcoin Core or Wasabi then probably not. Bitcoin Core doesn't query someone else for your transactions and Wasabi does not leak identifiable details as well.

In the case above, unless someone had a deliberate MITM between your connection to the other nodes, they wouldn't see the transaction being broadcasted from your node or at least with fairly little certainty that it was broadcasted from your IP.

Tl;dr: RBF to your own address leaks the same level of privacy as with your other transactions since you're only sending the funds back to yourself. The greater concern would be to use SPV wallets without proper privacy measures.

The escrow system that Satoshi mentioned here is not like the escrow system that we have here. Most of the escrow services has the intermediary holding full control of the funds and becoming a mediator in the event that something goes wrong. What Satoshi described was just a rough idea of how P2SH or by extension, Multisig currently works but in a 2-of-2 manner. A correct system would be whereby there is a 2-of-3 multisig where a trusted party holds onto the third key as a mediator if something goes wrong. This is only effective if the third party is trusted by both and also neutral to both of the parties involved in transaction.

Escrow existed before Bitcoin.

No and No. The secure element within those are designed to resist tempering attacks and you can't do all that much even if you were able to desolder and try to reverse engineer the secure element like in this case. It doesn't allow bruteforcing on the chip itself as it'll erase the contents after several attempts. This doesn't mean that secure elements are immune against them though. People were able to introduce faults into the secure element by using a laser fault injection which was fairly expensive to do.

It doesn't matter if it is open source or close source if the chip was poorly designed in the first place.

You enter the Bitcoin address so it should lookup your private key from your address.

The message is actually verified against your Bitcoin address as that is one of the three elements given to the person verifying it. Due to the unique characteristic of ECDSA, it is possible to derive the possible ECDSA public key from the signature itself. It is converted into the corresponding Bitcoin addresses during verification and then verified against the address given by the other party.

I don't think Blockchain.com is always at fault. Most of the losses actually results from user's negligence and there is nothing that they can do.

But, of all the online wallets out there, Blockchain.com is likely one of the worst coded ones. The incident for which they pushed an untested update and resulted in the R values reused inadvertently was an amateurish mistake and unforgivable. If you don't want to lose your funds or suffer any headaches, steer clear of Blockchain.com.

Blockchain.com does require their user to choose their fees but the way that it is labelled is potentially misleading, "Priority" and "Regular" for example. Without giving their users a clear timeframe for it to be confirmed, it usually causes much more confusion than the other wallets which gives a clear estimate. I'm not really sure about Coinbase though.

Its quite common for services to overcharge for their transactions; lesser loads for their support if the transaction gets stuck. Fees estimation algorithm tends to usually be more conservative with their estimates, depending on what client you're using. Referencing mempool directly either using an online UI or the wallet might be confusing for the user. At least ETAs would give a much clearer estimates on the timeframe.

You need to know the address to do so. On the paper wallet, is there any indication of the address? It starts with either 1, bc1 or 3. If there is, scan that QR code and key it into a blockexplorer like Blockchair.com to check the funds within that address.

I would highly recommend you to sweep the funds within to a new wallet that you control. It is never good to have someone else generate the keys for you, in this case the Bitcoin ATM I presume.

Hmm? I'm getting the idea that my post answers your topic subject as well as the general direction of your post.

The most accurate estimation of the maximum number as of now is less than 8 billion. It probably is exaggerated but as stated, it doesn't count those who don't store Bitcoins on their own addresses but rather on custodial wallets either for quicker trading or a higher perceived security. It's far more common than you think. I'm going out on a limb and say that each user probably doesn't have 10 addresses with funds at a given moment.

That is assuming that there is an insignificant amount of users holding their Bitcoins at exchanges and services.
No. You cannot assume that the active users on Reddit and Bitcointalk are all holding any amount of Bitcoins. Some users may very well just be participating in the discussion or are interested in holding coins other than Bitcoin.

There really isn't any way to calculate the number of unique Bitcoin users due to how its structured.

There isn't a requirement to maintain incoming connections nor can the node decide whether other nodes should connect to it. Outgoing connections is capped at 10 but can be lower as well. Incoming connection doesn't change with the discovery of other nodes but the knowledge of your node by others. 2 of the peers are reserved as block-relay only nodes which is read from anchors.dat.

Minimum 2GB if you prune it. ~ 370GB without.
OP is talking about the wallet.dat file.

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OP, the space occupied by the wallet.dat file is not an accurate representation of the number of transactions stored within. The size can be due to miscellaneous data being stored within. For reference, my empty wallet.dat occupies about 1392KB as well. If you want to be sure, just make sure you've loaded the correct wallet.dat and try to rescan again.