Yes I see you are using buzzwords. A quantum computer is not going to magically be able to come up with enough hashrate to attack bitcoin, you still have to be able to compute 10¹⁹ hashes per second to come close which is not yet possible.
And AI is not even applicable here, even with most advanced alien technology level AI you still need computing power to compute hashes!

The goal is actually to get to a place where merchants (and others) don't have to use a third party like payment processors to handle their payments. In other words the answer to your question is to not have these third parties in first place to change any fees at all!

In Bitcoin nodes follow the chain with the most amount of work. That is not necessarily the "longest" chain. You can use a single ASIC to mine the longest chain probably in less than an hour (by manipulating the timestamps, etc.) at difficulty 1 from the genesis block but it won't have the "most amount of work" hence it will not be followed.
If you want to "re-write" history, you need to have most hashrate to perform the most work (14+ years worth of work) which is obviously impossible.

Exactly. Many governments were forced to "obey" US policies. It is understandable too, after all US used to be be the only existing super power for decades that has been dictating the global policies which countries had to obey. It is also not easy to go against those policies even though it is rewarding, specially for countries that don't have the resources. Hence they sometimes have to even break their principles.

This is also one of the reasons why dedollarisation is important for the world. For example Pakistan that had to ask IMF for a dollar loan and be forced to apply laws (such as increasing energy prices) that hurts its economy while not even receiving the loan can now ask for a loan from China for example and not be forced to do anything like before and also be able to complete the gas pipeline so that it can receive gas from its western neighbor Iran since US won't have the same leverage to use to force Pakistan to not do it!

Things are not this black and white. Dumping dollar doesn't mean cutting ties with any of those countries you named. It means for example if Brazil wants to trade with one of its neighbors like Colombia or Venezuela they will no longer use dollar, they use their own currencies and other form of trade agreements. When they want to trade with China they use Yuan and when they want to trade with US and its colonies they use dollar.

Even if they move to gold, it doesn't matter who has the most of it! It is not a dick measuring contest
What it means is that they trades would be backed by something that is moderately stable and most important of all gold is something that you can NOT print out of thin air any time you wanted to!

P.S. Don't forget that 80-90 years or maybe more ago most people in the world didn't even know what dollar is. 250 years ago US didn't even exist and for thousands of years people from hundred something countries were trading with each other without problems they have today.

Well that's the problem. Bitcoin is not a decentralized cloud storage service. It never was and it should not be in the future either. And why do you say "dickbutt farting monkey"? I'd say "cure for cancer". It still is abuse of the system because once again bitcoin is not a cloud storage service...

That's what I don't see happening that easily. You see, there is incentive to create this type of nonsense. People could sell 500 satoshis for a million dollar (and even launder money that way). That means the market is a lot more complicated than thinking some idiots are selling monkey pics that would die off in a couple of weeks.

Here is another way of looking at The Ordinals Shenanigan which is using another way for it which is using a side-chain. Let me put it this way:
On one hand
- They claim they want to create "NFT" on Bitcoin but they can't and aren't.
- The bitcoin smart contracts are very limited (for good reasons too) and it is nearly impossible to make a significant change to the protocol adding new OP codes to allow them (this was discussed many years ago and rejected and led to creation of Ethereum).
- You want to be able to transfer the ownership of a "token" or whatever junk you insert in the blockchain which is not possible in Bitcoin since you can't create a token in first place or transfer the ownership of the content you injected into the chain!
- Bitcoin transactions can be expensive which is not desirable for the "token market"
- The blocks are also limited to disallow spam and the current Ordinals shenanigan is already angering a lot of people

On another hand
- By using a side-chain you will not have ANY of those limitations, it will literary open up a world of possibilities since it is 100% flexible to what the new protocol needs
- The smart contracts in a side-chain could be as complex as you want and need by having all kinds of new OP codes and even an entirely new script language
- You can create any kind of token on a side-chain without limitation
- Everything you create there can be pegged to bitcoin and benefiting from its high security.
- You won't have any issue with transferring ownership of these tokens
- You won't store that junk (or even cure for cancer ) in a ledger that is meant for financial transfers (ie. bitcoin blockchain) anymore
- You won't create fee spikes in bitcoin hence you won't have to pay a lot of money to transfer those tokens yourself either. The fees on the side-chain can be kept low too.
- You won't anger a lot of bitcoin users.

But of course those insisting that Ordinals is "valuable" don't want to hear any of that, instead they want to continue insisting on the persistent spam of the main chain! Ergo I continue insisting that this is a malicious attack.

I don't think news such as these has any major effects on the market anymore. We can also see that the market didn't really have any meaningful reaction to this news. Such big sales by US government are not uncommon, apart from SilkRoad they keep cracking down on businesses confiscating their coins and selling them regularly.

Any Linux operating system works, I personally always suggest Ubuntu since it is a popular distribution and a general purpose OS so you can always find any answer you seek on the internet very easily.
Here is an old guide: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=853288.0
There is a learning curve before you can get it right.

I wouldn't call $1k a "small amount" considering that hardware wallet prices are 1/10 to 1/20 of that, not to mention the rising bitcoin price where $1k worth of bitcoin today will be worth a lot more tomorrow. Phone wallets are not the best option for storage either.

About half the world is abandoning US Dollar but they are not all filling the gap left with Yuan. For example BRICS is defining its own currency, ASEAN members are using their own fiat currencies to trade among themselves, and a lot more dollar dumping cases that I post in my topic when I find.

But also there are many countries replacing it with Yuan. The most recent case is surprisingly France

Things are getting so bad that US congress members are speaking out
https://twitter.com/RepMTG/status/1640003690638524418

We don't use sign for any of the integers used in elliptic curve cryptography because the modular arithmetic is used. In calculations of ECDSA, etc. we may end up with negative values which by contract all numbers should be reported as positives so they are converted to their positive equivalent inside the used group. For example using modulo 7, a negative number like -5 becomes 2 that is -5≡2 (mod 7).

It's the same principle for negative a value like -y or when "negating" the y coordinate, you'd compute P-y (mod P) to get the positive value between 0 and P.

In West Asia nobody wants these radicals who are bombing innocent civilians on daily basis but some of the regimes were forced to accept its existence either because they were defeated in the war (eg. Egypt) or were ordered by United States to accept forced relationships (eg. Saudi regime). Such forced normalization attempts never changed the view of the population though which became too obvious during the World Cup in Qatar.
The regimes in West Asia are also slowly getting out of that forced position as US becomes weaker and is kicked out of the region. For example recently many of them including Saudi regime rejected flights from the occupied lands.

I want to point out that fee spikes is not always "manipulation" but it can be although it is commonly referred to as "spam attacks" which is where the malicious entities keep creating large numbers of transactions and keep injecting them into the mempool hence inflating the fee rate.

In normal times the fees go up when there is normal increase in number of transactions because of a normal event. Like when the price makes a big move (a big rise or a big drop) and many people move their coins to and from exchanges by making an on-chain transaction.
These "normal" events resolve easily as the cause disappears (eg. in case of price spike when the rise or drops slows the mempool starts clearing too). But in an attack, they can last much longer and their effects are more severe. Like most of 2017 where price kept rising hence increased the natural number of transactions while spammers kept spamming the mempool with tens thousands of spam tx per day.

BTW the situation with the fees and the mempool these days is not normal. There is a new form of attack going on!

There are a lot of ways in Bitcoin protocol that we don't "ban" something but make it more "expensive" as a discouragement for abuse or misuse. For example I recently answered a question about a rejected block, and that case was increasing the cost of sigops by 80 to discourage using P2MS, that is an example of making something "undesirable" more expensive hence discourage it.

I don't have a full chainstate to perform a full block verification but by verifying the block with what I have it seems like the block that @garlonicon shared on mega contains a bunch of transactions like [1] and [2] that are using multiple outputs with P2MS scripts. These scripts using OP_CHECKMULTISIG have a very high cost per OP, 20*4 to be exact. For example by my calculations tx [1] has a sigOpCount of 644 and [2] 2084.
The record belongs to [3] with 158 outputs and a sigOpCount of 12564[4]!

Note that these transactions aren't invalid on their own (as you can see from links below they are already included in another valid block), my guess is that the miner who mined the invalid block (00000000000000000002ec935e245f8ae70fc68cc828f05bf4cfa002668599e4) was running a modified code that didn't check sigOpCounts of blocks they constructed and they ended up including more of these transactions in their candid block as they should have hence creating the invalid block with too many (more than 80k) sigOps.

[1] https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/transaction/0b71a358a1f82e66143fb2dfd54b7cc9227dc8c054397f3fae703f474950f2c1
[2] https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/transaction/4af11e9067eade98e4210a4f739e3c651734b53164dd82e3821363cb586536c6
[3] https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/transaction/87dae4c816c9611038ee35e4662d71089e73f3041863165e56e3dd70d309b274
[4] If they had used something like P2WSH the sigOpCount of these 1of3 multi-sigs would have been something like 160 for this transaction instead of 12564.

The list of things that led to demise of United States is long, one of the main ones is abuse of power/sanctions. Another is the unstoppable money printing machines that are on a printing spree increasing the US national debt by the second.

The world has realized that they either have to endure US inflation in their own country or dump dollar so they are slowly but surely choosing the second option.
This is not the first time they do this either. They did it back when they first realized US economy is only alive because they print money that is no longer backed by anything, this was in the 70's and they ditched dollar and it got dumped hard and US economy turned into ashes in about 6 months.

Of course in the 70's US national debt was only in billions of dollars, to be more specific in 1970 it was only $371 billion dollar and today it is $31,653 billion ($31.6 trillion) which is a 8431% rise! US is also not the hegemony it was back in 70's without competition. US military is not nearly as strong as it was back in 70's. US also doesn't have the energy rich colonies it had back in the 70's.
The dump of dollar this time is going to be a lot more catastrophic and there will be no coming back.

Unless the US regime can think of any other scam like last time (Petrodollar) or start a World War, I don't see the trend of dedollarisation slowing down.

This has nothing to do with scalability at all. In fact none of the major fee spikes in bitcoin history had anything to do with scalability. They have always happened because of spam attacks. For example the biggest and longest period in which fees went up and stayed up were in 2017 and it was mainly because of the largest spam attack against bitcoin network in its entire history.
Today we are seeing another form of spam attack hence the increased fees.

That's only for receiving blocks not for relaying them. In other words the nodes must not relay the header alone before fully verifying the block itself. If a node sent you an invalid block that node is either malicious or a broken/buggy implementation.

Additionally compact block feature is about reducing your node's traffic consumption. Basically your node already has most of the transactions that are waiting to be confirmed in its mempool and a new block usually contains transactions that you already have in your mempool (verified). So your node can skip re-downloading and re-verifying them and instead download the parts it doesn't already have.

P.S. I wish you shared the entire block not just its hash if you had it.

It depends on bitcoin's volatility. As long as bitcoin price remains volatile it is not the best option for mass adoption because it remains a currency and the ups and downs its value has hurts its usage. But assuming with mass adoption comes stability then bitcoin is THE best option to be used because it is the only existing form of "money" that is far superior to the fiat that is currency and has inflation as its main characteristic (ie. lacks store of value characteristic) while bitcoin does not.

Oh how I hate these platform games with their terrible graphics and terrible physics. I hated them when I was young and I still hate them, they are just so terrible
It's a nightmare to play them too specially at the arcades where you had to pay to lose because the physics made no sense and get frustrated. lol

To be clear, Ordinals is not a "platform", it is a simple bitcoin transaction that uses an exploit to abuse the system by injecting arbitrary data (mostly garbage) into the blockchain. As Franky said there is no transfer of that content or the ownership of it taking place in this attack either.
They are basically trying to sell fungible satoshis to fools at a higher price by using the buzzword "NFT".

It's mostly revenge in my opinion. After the Opium War waged on China they went back to an old ideology that basically says "be like grass, bend but don't break". They built their economy up from having 85% of their massive population in absolute poverty to having 0% absolute poverty and the strongest economy at present. They did that by "bending" but not "breaking".
Now they are taking revenge.

The only thing that should matter to the rest of us is to not allow China to replace US after the collapse of United States like Soviet Union did before it.