That's not true.
The code for the initial release can be found on github[1] and the script part of the code is almost identical to what we have today. OP codes such as OP_CAT that were removed weren't providing any kind of "transaction execution programming" that you claim. Their removal also had nothing to do with "making network faster" they were removed because they made no sense and were buggy.

[1] https://github.com/Maguines/Bitcoin-v0.1

When we say "Bitcoin" it is not just about the full node implementation. Simplified Verification Protocol is also part of the Bitcoin protocol also defined in the white paper. Which is why Electrum is also an implementation of [part of] Bitcoin protocol.

Bitcoin is a protocol (a set of rules) and this protocol is turned into computer code by programmers (also known as developers). There are different implementations of Bitcoin and the most popular one that is known as reference implementation is bitcoin core. Others exist like Electrum, btcd, gocoin, etc. with different features and different level of popularity.

The implementations are open source most of the times and it means you can both see the whole code and if you can contribute to improving it if you know programming. Contributions from everyone is always welcome.

However, any changes in the protocol itself requires the whole community (miners, full nodes, users, etc.) to accept them. They are implemented through a process called "fork". Anybody can propose a change and offer an implementation of it.

Exploitable vulnerabilities in Electrum has not been that common so the statement is not very accurate. But yes, it is best that you update to the latest version as often as you can because developers put a lot of effort into improving the wallet.

BRICS is a group of countries not a currency! It is more of a cooperation group with economy and development as its main purpose in addition to dumping the dollar. Even though they have talked about defining their own currency, they still haven't done that.

The only way BRICS could affect bitcoin is if they adopt bitcoin as one of the handful of methods they are currently using for payment among themselves. Otherwise there is no effects.

Only someone who lives in United States and a US colony and is feeling the pressure of dumping the dollar such as inflation+recession at the same time, would think dumping dollar (ie. what BRICS does) is the "wrong direction" for those countries to go

Maybe instead of worrying about dedollarisation, worry about printers that are constantly printing the dollar?

I'm even more sure now that you feel threatened by the ongoing dedollarisation.

This seems to be the most popular assumption so far although it sounds wrong. As I've said before this type of attack (unlike the previous forms) creates an incentive to spam so the attackers may not care about the cost while regular users sending bitcoin around do. That incentive is the scam market that is being built around the Ordinals Attack.

The logic is similar to the withdrawal fee people pay exchanges. Normally you'd say 50k-100k satoshi fee for a bitcoin transaction is outrageously high and yet you'd pay it to withdraw your coins from the exchange simply because there is an incentive to send your coins there in first place (profit from trading) hence that amount doesn't seem that high.

It depends but most of the times the answer is no, you don't need to upgrade to each release.

Generally speaking if the new release contains new features, some improvements and bug fixes that don't affect you (like fixing a bug related to hardware wallets and you don't own a hardware wallet) you don't need to upgrade.
But if the new release contains bug fixes that may affect you (like the fix in the communication protocol where the malicious server could show you a malicious HTML formatted message) then it is best to upgrade.

You can always check out the release notes here to see what was changed: https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/blob/master/RELEASE-NOTES

If you take all the necessary precautions, yes. That means having a backup of your wallet (eg. seed phrase written on paper) and verifying the signatures of the binaries you download.

Binance is only known for centralization and nothing else. Every service they offer (under any name like DEX, wallet, etc.) is completely centralized and there really is nothing P2P there.

It is old.
It is 100% open source.
It is popular which makes it reviewed and more trustworthy.
I have looked the code myself (not exactly a full review but enough to trust it).
It supports deterministic builds (ie. reproducible binaries).
It is easy to use and is user friendly.
It offers almost all the features that you want from a wallet.

Bitcoin went from $15k to $31k and now it is only slightly lower than $30k level. This trend is now what you have been trying to say it is. It is not "crypto winter" and bitcoin wasn't "pumping" when it went up as it is not "dumping" now that it has came down a little.

In any case there are two main reasons for this recent "tiny" drop, the main one is the fact that price failed to go any higher and short term traders are pulling out their profit trying to gain another entry at a lower price to make more profit.

It is also because of the ongoing recession that I've been talking about over the past year. People simply have not enough money to invest and they also are forced to sell whatever assets they have to make a living. Hence the sell pressure.
You can see this in all markets and also in the society. For example check out how the number of looting of supermarket, shops, grocery stores, etc. has skyrocketed inside United States over the past couple of months.

Why does bitcoin has to be versus anything, why not bitcoin AND real estate. In fact that is the best way of looking at bitcoin, a currency with a price that is not tied to any other markets which makes it an excellent choice for those who want to diversify.

Yes, we love fakes like the time RQ170 was captured and it was all fake until Obama begged Iran to give it back and one of our toy companies sent them a toy replica of it instead. Or my favorite fake story was where the US marines were forced to their knees in Persian Gulf right before they started pissing their pants and crying like little girls on On January 12, 2016. It was so fake that these marines were court marshaled when they went back to US

Those are some twisted half truths mainly posted by ethereum.org regarding the difference between Bitcoin and Ethereum.

The actual difference is that Bitcoin is a currency and it has to do what a currency does, so its ledger (the blockchain) is to store monetary transfers. So the Bitcoin smart contracts are designed in a way to answer that need and nothing else.

Ethereum on the other hand is a platform for token creation (and not a currency) so it is designed to offer features that a platform would which means the smart contract language is designed in a way to let you create tokens.

Asking why Bitcoin doesn't support NFTs is like asking why you can't use your car to vacuum your house!

Well, these same countries have the leading regimes against freedom of any kind. They have already banned usage of any social media platform that is not under their full control and are currently passing laws that would make using VPNs (that are not government honeypots) illegal. If they ban bitcoin their collection will have been completed.

There could be a lot of reasons most of which have nothing to do with the market.
For example one reason would be to change wallet. For example I have some coins from back in 2014 that I haven't moved to this day (that is also close to 10 years), I have a plan to set a new wallet up using a brand new USB disk (ie. a cold storage with Ubuntu and Electrum) and using the new address format (P2WPKH) and send them there and also claim some of the shitcoin airdrops. I haven't had the time to do it yet though.

Apparently Satoshi had never read page 35 of the Standards for efficient cryptography, SEC 1: Elliptic Curve Cryptography published on 2009 on Symmetric Encryption Schemes before writing this wrong reply

Post #15 is a better fit response to the Ordinals Attack (slightly modified below)
I.E. Side Chain.

It's a matter of accepting defeat. They couldn't fight the poorest country in West Asia, Yemen after 8 years and with the full support of NATO only because Yemen had a single friend called Iran. Same with Syria, Qatar, Iraq, etc.
They had to accept defeat at some point, specially after in only 1 hour their oil production was cut in half back in September 2019 when Yemenis retaliated hard against their invaders' infrastructure.

As they say necessity is the mother of invention. Although I may be biased but I wouldn't say shoulder to shoulder because US military technology is mostly fake and in some cases very outdated. In a lot of fields when you actually compare the two, the US military technology looks more like a joke. Like in the missiles field. There a bunch of factors but in the accuracy alone the Iranian missiles have an error of about 1 meter per 1000 km range while US missiles have an accuracy of about 100 meters per 1000 km range! Of course 1 meter is the official release but it feels like an understatement when we have satelite images like this: https://ibb.co/5nn2PD4 from the US airbase where the Iranian missile has hit the bullseye.

From what I gather the reason is because the military sector in USA has turned into a business that milks the government for outrageous amount of funds to produce ultra expensive products that aren't even up to the standards.

Take Lockheed Martin. They milked US government for hundreds of billions of dollars in early 2000's for 10 years to return multiple failed project until they produced an aircraft that they called "The Beast". That is RQ-170 and it was supposed to be stealth.
Long story short US Intelligence thinking it is the most advanced stealth aircraft to that date tried using it over Iran for spying, little did they know that the moment it crossed Iranian border on 2011-12-4, this multi-billion dollar project would easily be hacked and then safely landed and captured by Armed Forces of Iran which would then continue to reverse engineer and mass produce it with a dozen variations at super cheap prices

There are lots of examples too: RQ-4C which USN had 3 of, F35 which is the biggest failure among fighter jets, Patriot and THAAD systems that are a joke among air defense systems, USVs that regularly get lost and hacked at sea, etc.

By running a full node (fake or real) you don't gain any kind of advantage or disadvantage. So you can't call "being easy to create fake nodes" a weakness. It also has nothing to do with bitcoin being permissionless and decentralized.

The real question that you forgot to answer first is "Why would we want to prevent 'fake' nodes from entering the network". They certainly aren't gaining any kind of advantage and they also not capable of harming the network in any way since they will be banned quickly if they act maliciously.

They are also very good at abusing their power to some day start banning those who they don't like hence ruining the whole decentralized system.

P.S. Considering your title and your title only contains the word "PoW" I think you are confused about what a node is and what a miner is. You can create a fake node but you can't create a fake miner because to be a miner you have to have real computing power.

The thing about base58 encoded addresses is that they don't have a fixed length, they can have between 25 and 34 characters (for mainnet P2PKH). This means you should set your "Lower Limit" value to "1Bitcoin11111111111111111" (25 characters in total) and your "Higher Limit" should be "1Bitcoinzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz" (34 characters in total).

But now there is another problem. These limits (25 and 34 chars) happen on very special occasions and can not happen with every combination of characters. But there is an easy fix, you just decode the initial limits I mentioned above and if the result was less than the RIPEMD160 size (20+1+4 byte) you pad the shorter values and remove characters from longer ones.

Keep ind mind that because of how Base58 encoding works there is not a 1:1 relationship between bytes and number of characters. In other words if for example your result is missing 3 bytes you can't just add 3 characters. You have to do it step by step to find the correct value like this (added 8 chars to get the missing 6 bytes):

Now you have to choose the lower (hex) value from the lower limit that gives 25 bytes and the higher (hex) value from the upper limit that gives 25 bytes.
As you can see here we had 2 variation of lower limit with 25 bytes and the lower hex value is the first one but we only got one valid result for upper limit so the actual search space is:

As they say "There's none so blind as those who will not see.". The dedollarisation is still ongoing and there is enough discussion about it on this forum without needing a new topic being opened every day with every tiny news.

The most recent news is the United States Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen admitting that the world is dumping the dollar.
There are lots of signs of the weakening dollar too. From the inflation+recession going on in US that has led to mass firing of employees and increased unemployment and banking system falling apart to the economic hardship that has led to a significant increase in number of people who loot supermarkets across United States every day.

It would be spam to open a new topic every day to say for example yet another Walmart store was looted 2 days ago in Chicago by hungry Americans.

Besides if you were expecting dollar to dump down to zero overnight or disappear from the world, that was your mistake. Countries aren't dumping dollar overnight or even all at once. They reduce their dependence slowly. For example a country that was trading 100% in dollar is now trading 80% in dollar and 20% in other currencies and by the end of 2023 this percentage would reach 50-50 and next year to 20-80. And that process will continue to weaken US Dollar.

Remember the submarine news? It is the nuclear-powered Ohio-class called USS Florida and Iran just forced it to surface as it entered the Persian Gulf region. CENTCOM will probably deny this ever happened since as I said the news from couple of days ago was supposed to have domestic use, if American tax payers realize the junk they sent to West Asia is not even useful things could get ugly domestically...
https://gulfnews.com/world/mena/iran-says-its-navy-forces-us-submarine-to-surface-as-it-enters-the-gulf-1.95244912

P.S. What they don't tell is the stealth Iranian submarines that shadow them and monitor all their movements and communications 24/7