Your general idea is correct, you just made some small mistakes:

Bitcoin does support smart contracts, in fact each transaction you make, you are creating and using smart contracts. It just doesn't have certain functionality that would allow creation of tokens.

It is not about TPS or capacity. In other words even if bitcoin could handle 1 GB blocks and a billion transactions per second, these types of spam would still not be tolerated.

To put simply it is all about usage. Bitcoin was created to handle transferring money not as a cloud storage.

To be clear there is no such thing as "BRC-20" in Bitcoin or Taproot. It is not part of the protocol. It is fake centralized term the scammers are using to give their attack some sort of legitimacy in the eyes of the naive.

I don't think this can "end" bitcoin but it is definitely damaging it real hard and must be prevented.

Again BRC-20 does not exist anywhere in the protocol to be removed. There is a vulnerability in bitcoin consensus rules that is being exploited by malicious attackers and that must be patched.
At this point the best solution is a soft fork to mend the flaw.

Read this topic it seems to be claiming that there were no double spends but failed attempts at replacing blocks. In other words they were never part of the chain. In other words there was never a fork, chain split or double spend to begin with.

If we have the stale block, it would be trivial to check whether there was a double spend and how.
All it takes is to go through all the "inputs" of all the transactions in the stale block(s) and then find each and every one of them in the replacing blocks (in the actual chain) and see if the "outputs" are still the same or are similar.

pseudocode

10k bytes may be too big and remain exploitable (eg. using multiple inputs) and we can't do anything about OP_PUSH itself since the signature and pubkeys are also pushed to the stack that way.
We should first come up with a size that we need based on the transactions that people are making and NOT leave the protocol wide open like this. Unless there is any Taproot scripts that need anything bigger than 100-200 bytes, there is no need to let it be bigger than that.

This is a dumb argument made by people who either have never looked at bitcoin source code or are intentionally ignoring it. Under the hood, in the consensus rules, spam attacks like this have always been possible but we have been preventing them using the standard rules.
This is also not demand for more block space, this is a spam attack. Period.

Keep in mind that ICO scam is still alive to this day. They kept changing the name and upgrading their scam methods:
Ordinals attack looks somewhat similar:

I'm a little busy these days and need to find some links before I can post some historical facts about some of the attacks against bitcoin that let's just say look very suspicious... So hold that thought...

It can't. Tokens need a blockchain where they are stored not just a layer where nothing is stored and only money changes hands. Side chain is the solution and if they wanted to end up there, they would have started there considering how solutions already exist!

Wrong. They are not using the protocol, they are abusing an exploit. There is big difference.

You should take a step back and ask the following question first: Why do we acquire bitcoin?
Is it only to be able to send money at a low cost? Is it only to make profit? Or is it something more like to reach financial sovereignty?

When we clarify that purpose we can then start arguing about the FUD that some people are spreading these days. The main purpose of Bitcoin was to create a decentralized censorship resistant payment system, and it has done that well enough. Of course nobody likes the current situation cause by this attack that has increased the fees to unreasonable levels but the main principles of Bitcoin that leads to increasing adoption of it are still intact.

Obviously Bitcoin is not perfect and there are attack vectors that every now and then different malicious entities use to attack it. For example during 2017 which was one of the biggest bull runs in bitcoin history, we had the largest attacks too. Millions of dollars were wasted on those attacks; 6 years later bitcoin is still here and strong.

ROFL
You can't just replace bitcoin with another altcoin specially not with centralized shitcoins like Solana that have a massive premine.
Different countries have accepted bitcoin as a currency and some as legal tender, not altcoins.
Different merchants are accepting bitcoin as a payment and it is extremely rare for them to accept shitcoins.

P.S. This attack is not yet as big as 2017 spam attack.

FYI they were saying the same thing back in 2017 that the spam attack is benefiting miners and they will never accept the soft fork and they will continue spamming to keep the fees up. We know what happened after that...

By that logic we should not have hard forked after the 2010 value overflow exploit and called it "legitimate usage of the protocol" and allowed the miner to keep the massive amount of coins they received as reward after exploiting the system!

As I've said many times, bitcoin use case is very clear. It is NOT a cloud storage so anything like Ordinals that exploit the protocol to use bitcoin blockchain as a cloud storage must be prevented. If you want to compare this exploit with legitimate adoption by people and countries then I don't really know how to answer your first question

The fact that you have to ask this question proves you haven't seen my proposals ergo we did need a new topic.

To summarize the way to prevent this attack should have been the same method we have been using forever to prevent similar attacks and exploits. It could have been introduction of standard rules that would have made such malicious transactions non-standard hence majority of full nodes would have refused to relay them and that would have successfully prevented this attack from growing.
Standard rules are easy to implement too since they don't need a fork, we just had to get full nodes to run a patch for their old clients or run the newest release to enforce the new rule.

However, I don't see this method being effective anymore considering how the scam has grown big and the market size of it is considerable enough to encourage the scammers to run full nodes themselves without enforcing the said standard rule to relay their spam. There is also incentive for them to pay the miners behind the scene to mine their malicious transactions.

At this point I'm afraid we need a soft fork to make these transactions invalid/illegal as part of the consensus rules which is much more challenging since it requires implementation, locked-in period, getting miners to vote and accept this fork, etc.
But that effectively and easily prevent this attack whilst keeping the protocol flexible for future improvements. For example the rule can only limit the witness size for version 1 program (similar to version 0) and leave any bigger size for any future possible usages (if they arise) to future versions which are already non-standard and not relayed by any of the full nodes.

With the increasing financial crisis in United States and with the collapse of the banking system and also the real estate market being on the brink of similar collapse, people have been moving towards investing in gold more than ever before. This is why in recent weeks we've seen a significant increase in demand for gold and the consequent price rise.
Bloomberg also recently published an article on this matter. Although I don't agree with some parts (like interest in "technology stocks") but it is worth reading:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-05-05/jpmorgan-sees-investors-moving-to-gold-tech-amid-recession-risk

There has been a speculation that this attack is going to fade away slowly and there won't be any need for intervention to fix the protocol where it is being exploited by the Ordinals Attack. That seems like wishful thinking now.

As I've feared the market around this scam is growing hence creating the incentive to attack Bitcoin more and with more people. According to brc-20[dot]io website the trading volume of this scam has surpassed $10 million daily with a total of 14,079 scams at the moment.

We can see the effects of this attack on the mempool with the fees surpassing 300 satoshi/vbytes.
https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#BTC,24h,weight
https://mempool.space/

This will only get worse as the scam grows and the scammers and idiots trading this garbage don't care about paying $50, $100+ for a transaction if they are laundering money with a fake transaction they call a token that is worth $1100+ or have a chance of scamming an idiot who would pay them that much for this garbage.
Regular users on the other hand do care about being forced to pay such outrageous fees just because scammers are spamming the chain.



The full nodes will also start being put under pressure as the spam will increase cost of running a full node for many reasons. From the increased traffic putting high pressure on their mempool and transaction relays to their chainstate (UTXO database) growing with a lot of dust outputs that can not be spent but they have to load in their memory for transaction processing.



https://statoshi.info/d/000000009/unspent-transaction-output-set?orgId=1&from=1682080884686&to=1683521607397

Both of the above charts show a very fast slope of how this attack is growing in size and severity.

Decentralized social media is simply impossible to create.

Think about bitcoin that is decentralized. People running full nodes are downloading, verifying and storing hundreds of gigabytes of data because they have an incentive to do so (they want to use the decentralized currency). There are miners providing a tremendous amount of computing power to secure that network. The chain also doesn't grow that much.

Now think about a social media platform. Facebook stores about 300 petabytes of data (petabyte is 1,000,000 gigabyte). How are you going to convince regular people to run a full node that stores a fraction of that amount? It is not even possible to run such full nodes. That means centralization of full nodes to data centers!
What would be the incentive for miners (or "processors" in a different algorithm) to secure that network? Adding monetary incentive is certainly out of the question because that would mean people have to pay to post and it would also centralized mining/processors very quickly.

This is why we either see very small scale projects with tiny number of users or centralized/semi-centralized projects like steemit using the blockchain technology.

You sign a message using the private key, it makes no difference what the address type derived from that private key was. The result is also an ECDSA signature that contains r and s. You can NOT "extract private key" from that.

In OP you said "from transaction or signed message". The differences mentioned earlier are in transactions (output scripts) mostly.

You use your private key to sign. Always.

When you create an ECDSA signature your public key can be derived from the signature + message.
When you provide a message signature (BIP0137) you only provide the message, signature and a single byte helping the public key recovery.
When you sign a transaction, you always include the public key to help the verification process.

In any case when you provide ECDSA signature the public key is also revealed one way or another. And you can never derive a private key from a public key otherwise the whole asymmetric cryptography becomes obsolete.

It's not my fault that you have no access to google, have no idea what 5th fleet is, what it's area of operation and its purpose for operating there is and who published the video of the seizure

I explicitly mentioned that anything that falls within the accepted methods of performing things can be considered not-spam. Colored coins and anything using OP_RETURN (regardless of my personal feelings) is not a spam.
You can't really compare that with the Ordinals Attack which is based on an exploit of the protocol though!

That would be true for an actual protocol that is also decentralized. When it comes to a centralized platform that is using an exploit to attack bitcoin, "breaking" is not even defined for it.

You can't use second layer if the primary layer isn't functioning well. In other words this will have the exact opposite effect since the cost of moving in and out of LN channel is also high.

As far as I remember the case they did NOT ban the software (bitcoin core) in UK, they enforced copyright laws on the paper alone accepting the claims by the scammer regarding his ownership of the paper published by someone else!

As for what governments can do about wallets, absolutely nothing. Bitcoin and its implementations are open source protocol and open source software. Governments can not "regulate" that at all. The only thing they can do is to regulate usage of bitcoin in centralized services. For example they could regulate supermarkets (which they already are) to ask for you to provide an ID if you want to pay with bitcoin!

Your question is too broad to answer, you are basically asking about at least 20 pages of details on how to process transactions.
If you have anything particular in mind then be more specific so that we can help you better.
If you just want to verify transactions (and see r,s,m, etc) or see how they are verified, then use a library (or any implementation of Bitcoin), enter a transaction for verification and "debug" the code to see the steps.
If you want to learn more about the technical details of how things work then I suggest starting to learn how bitcoin scripts work as your first step since that is needed in computation of m (transaction hash used in signing).

And you will never find such a website because such a thing is never made public. It is usually a service run for profit by companies including blockchain analysis companies where they sell said information. Not to mention that others that are "deanonymizing" bitcoin transactions are doing it covertly since if it becomes public that they are being monitored through a certain method, people would avoid those methods (eg. using a certain SPV implementation that is single server dependent).

Bitcoin is working with UTXOs or coins instead of using balance (like banks).
It is like cash. Think of UTXOs as physical metal coins. If you received 100x $1 coins, it would be heavy and take a lot of space to carry compared to if you received a single $100 coin which is very easy to carry around.
That's the same with UTXOs, when you received 100x $1 worth of bitcoin payments, you have 100 "coins" to spend. When spending those, your transaction size in bytes would be bigger so you'd have to pay for a much bigger space on the block. Hence the higher fee.

But also the fee rate these days is higher and it is due to an ongoing spam attack against the Bitcoin network. It's 2017 all over again and these spam transactions are artificially filling the blocks making the fees shoot up. The methods they use are very similar too, they jut improved it by finding a way to get other people to spam the network without thinking they are spamming.
The attack will come to an end if the spammers run out of money or the incentive to spam goes away (ie. if the scam market where they are selling Ordinals garbage dies) or if the exploit is fixed to prevent this attack.

That sounds more like a desperate attempt to make dollar (ie a US made and US controlled currency) relevant again. A centralized currency (unlimited, so its fiat again) is being created by an American organization to be used in a service that is practically controlled by US and is basically using dollar.

I'm surprised that you even ask this question

I don't think buying and holding large quantities of bitcoin has any meaningful effects on the volatility because volatility is caused mainly by the size of the market and the order books. People don't leave the market if someone "freezes" something like 10 million bitcoin and they won't become super active if that someone didn't "freeze" that much.

The only concern I have when it comes to introducing bitcoin to others is when bitcoin is introduced as an investment to make profit. Otherwise when it is introduced as it really is, which is the only decentralized currency, that is fine.
Although I don't know how you do it but from your other topics and the points on the blackboard it seems like it is the later which is fine.

No, that's the thing. These are not tokens, this is all fakery which means they insert some data into the chain and call that a token. That's all. The rest are normal transactions that don't even have the spam data! They just transfer bitcoin just like any other transaction.

The line is already drawn. It is not about the content, it is all about the purpose.

Any transaction that is not made with the sole purpose of transferring bitcoin (and nothing else) is spam and should be prevented. But we all tolerate other transactions as long as they are done through the defined and accepted methods like using OP_RETURN. This is because these transactions don't harm the system but when anything comes along that is exploiting/abusing the system that's a different story.

After all Bitcoin is not a decentralized cloud storage...