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.

That's about priorities and you are right. At this point their priority is more about services and either shutting them down (like shutting down mixers) or applying maximum surveillance on that service (like payment processor, custodial wallets and exchanges).
But that doesn't change that fact that developers are also on the governments' list...

His point is that bitcoin core never relayed SegWit transactions using uncompressed keys and miners needed to manually modify the core code to make it happen whereas in Ordinals Attack core is already relaying such transactions so adding the standard rule now wouldn't be as effective.

It is called dedollarisation and it has been going on for a very long time (at least the past decade) but it started speeding up in the past year and ever since US economy started falling apart and FED decided to export more of US inflation to other countries.
I cover more cases in this topic: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5432581.0

Basically the whole world (even US allies) have always wanted to dump the dollar after Nixon administration, but for a lot of reasons (including lack of independence) they have been slow. This is also why we are currently only seeing countries with more independence from US dumping the dollar while others slowly joining in at a smaller scale.
Although Saudi regime as the 51st US state is an exception, they have no independence but are joining in because they were forced to; essentially after Aramco was hit and their oil production was cut by half.

This is exactly why cash or fiat is NOT money it is actually currency. Very few people know this distinction though. Basically ever since they decided to print fiat unstoppably they turned fiat into currency that can only be used as medium of exchange while it lost its store of value status.

BTW this is why one of the characteristics of bitcoin is to be both a store of value and medium of exchange, or in other words bitcoin is the best candidate to be considered "money" not just a "currency".

That's a good point, although Monero has a very niche utility (anonymity) which severely restricts its usefulness because of its target audience and it also is harder to use and has bad scaling problems.

In a way bitcoin already is the only cryptocurrency that exists. If you look at other projects we have different categories:
- We have useless copy coins like bcash, bgold, ... that can only be categorized as shitcoins which aren't used for anything other than scamming people.
- We have memecoins, flawed projects, broken chains, etc. like Doge and a lot of dead coins that are also useless and can't be categorized as "currency"
- Finally we have tokens and token platforms like ethereum and thousands of shittokens made on it that are not currencies and not to mention are useless.

P.S. A better question you should have asked was something like this: "What if we had another useful cryptocurrency like bitcoin that had an actual innovation and was actually solving a real problem?"

True but remember that before Taproot it was also possible but never happened. You see, in these attacks the attackers want regular people to be able to easily participate in it otherwise if they have to go through some centralized service, it would become harder and could even become impossible if the community puts pressure on that service to stop accepting the malicious attack.

Actually unlike Taproot, the consensus rules for P2WSH has a line to check the data size that is being pushed to the stack and also the witness items data sizes that are already the stack itself.
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/84f4ac39fda7ffa5dc84e92d92dd1eeeb5e20f8c/src/script/interpreter.cpp#L1815

I'd like to thank you for the opportunity you gave me to be part of this campaign.
Sorry for the short stay and good luck.

Thanks! Both signature and avatar are updated.

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Another group of countries joined the "Dollar Dumping Party". These are about a dozen countries in South East Asia in an economic union called The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) that came to an agreement amongst themselves to dump dollar in all the trades that takes place in this union. That is 8.5% of the world population.
What makes this one interesting is the countries in this bloc such as Philippines and Vietnam and some others that are not known for doing anything "against US wishes"...

This terrorist organization is already falling apart from inside, there is nothing they can do to prevent that anymore. They never looked for peace either, just recently they had the audacity to claim Jordan is theirs and has to be taken.

That is already under way and funny thing is that US caused it
For example Iraq recently switched to using Yuan because US kept blocking their money after they sold their energy using dollar because they were demanding that US ends its illegal occupation of their country. Now they are using Yuan and their money is no longer blocked/stolen by US regime.

One of the reasons why countries default is because of how US keeps exporting its inflation abroad and manipulates the interest rates to keep dollar strong. Suddenly we have countries that have had their national currency dumped against dollar (because of US exported inflation) that have to pay a lot more than what they'd borrowed.

Abandoning US dollar solves that too, when dollar crashes you'd pay 0.1 Rupee (or even less) for a dollar instead of 283

When spending bitcoins we aren't only verifying a hash. Each coin that is sent and spent is using a smart contract or in other words a locking and unlocking mechanism that is a series of "operations" that all need to pass for the coins to be spendable. Only a puzzle transaction made for fun would use a OP_HASH OP_EQUALVERIFY alone, all other "contracts" use a mandatory signature verification OP. If you can find a way to produce a signature for that public key, then you'd be able to spend those coins.

This is not a flaw, this is how cryptography is designed. You can't find private key of a randomly generated public key just as you can't find a collision for either SHA256 or RIPEMD160 and we are very far from the day that it becomes feasible.

What I said before is starting to come true, a large number of Americans have been pulling their money out of the banks. So far hundreds of billions of dollars have been pulled out. Very few of those who make a withdrawal would put it in their mattress! Majority of them would try to invest into something specially since dedollarisation is expanding to more countries and the threat of dollar collapsing is more serious now; obviously one of the very viable options is bitcoin.
Hence the SEC fear and their subsequent warning...

Normal people have different attitude towards the Ordinals Attack that range from negative to saying "whatever" but when you see someone is passionately defending something that is clearly a malicious attack and does that by spreading misinformation about it, you have to know something is wrong. When knowing their background and their involvement in running multiple similar scams both on token platforms and bitcoin blockchain, everything starts to make more sense...

You are just playing with words and bending the truths. The abuse of the system is not an arbitrary opinion. In fact the Ordinals abusive behavior is pretty clear since it is turning bitcoin (aka a payment system) and its blockchain (aka a ledger to store monetary transactions) into a cloud storage. As abuses go, it doesn't get any clearer than this!

As for the protocol, it is left "loose" in some places so that it can be extended but always within the same utility category that Bitcoin is supposed to offer, not to turn Bitcoin into something else like cloud storage!

Their alternative would be setting up a website that would publicly accept transactions that majority of full nodes rejected. Apart from the fact that it would make them pariahs, the miners aren't known for doing such things, they are too scared of producing an invalid block and losing money. Look at how long it took to mine a simple non-standard transaction that was using uncompressed public key in its version 0 witness program, just because they were scared of losing revenue.

That is an inaccurate or incomplete definition. Mining is about constructing a new block in the chain and setting the header in a way that this 80-byte construct has a specific hash lower than the target.
In each block header there are 5 fields: version, previous block header hash, merkle root hash, block time, target, nonce. From these fields the previous hash and target are fixed while the rest are variables with version and time having some limits. As I said the miner finds a combination of these that has the desired hash. For example by changing the transactions in the block or their orders the miner can change the merkle root hash hence change the header hash.

You are getting some terminology wrong, blocks contain transactions not some data about them. Also nonce is a 32-bit integer not a code.

Well price isn't "high" now. It is barely above the previous ATH, about 30% above whereas in every previous cycle price were at least 900% above that previous ATH (ie at $200k).

As for my take on the current price and the market, I still think the demand is increasing every day specially as the banking system fail and the inflation grows since people are losing their faith in the corrupt monetary system and want something that can act as a hedge against inflation.
But the problem is that at the same time we have recession in most countries that are mainly defined in the Western Bloc and in recession people liquidate their assets and are not capable of making more investments.

The combination of these two forces is creating this weird market where price shows all kinds of rising signals and yet it only goes up a little.

You are looking at trading volume, that's misleading.
The number that CMC and similar sites report (like 500k per day) is total trading volume and it is usually trading volume of all pairs involving bitcoin not bitcoin against fiat only. Bitcoin/Fiat pair has the most effect on price, Bitcoin/StableShitcoins has less effect and Bitcoin/Altcoins has no effect. As an example the volume on Coinbase in the past 24 hours and was about 18k bitcoins.

Trading volume also doesn't completely show demand so it is not the most accurate thing to look at when analyzing "new sell pressure". For example people buying and selling the same coins in a tight price space makes up a lot of volume but they can not and will not resist sell pressures.

900BTC sold per day may not be significant but it is in no way negligible. It indeed has an effect on the market. After all we are talking about $24 million per day, in other words on average people have to inject NEW $24 million into the market every day, and that's just to keep the price the same as before.