The biggest problem for Europe is that the politicians have no backbone, so they have no will for change. Not to mention that US anticipated its European cash cows go rogue so they have been eliminating anybody who thought of independence over the years. Which is the whole political scene in Europe is a mess over the past couple of years with government in England falling apart 3 times in a row, in France with millions protesting against the government, and so on.

Haha. He has been angry at bitcoin ever since bitcoin market capitalization overtook his company's market capitalization. But all kidding aside he has always been saying nonsense about bitcoin, my favorite is calling bitcoin "rat poison" which is incidentally the most accurate description of bitcoin anybody could give. Rat poison kills rats that are the corrupt ancients in the old and outdated financial system.

BTW his company has been having a hard time ever since April 2022 and has been in red almost entire last year (25% dumped). That's despite all the billions they pump into it

bitnodes.io can only detect nodes that are accepting incoming connections not all bitcoin nodes. In order to have a better view of the whole network and see all nodes (or at least a lot more than just those nodes accepting incoming connection) you'd have to run strong servers with multiple nodes accepting incoming connections and receive connection from a large part of the network.

And the way to detect the first node types is by using their public announcements (addr message they send out) even though the nodes you connect to and send a getaddr message are not going to send you all the announcements which means your "crawler" has to connect to a lot of nodes and for a long time to be able to construct as large a database as possible.

Their location is a matter of categorizing IP addresses and mapping them to geography.

If you want to end up storing the result digitally then there is no point in this step (and the steps leading to this) because the main purpose of encoding the result as a set of words is to make it easy for the user to write down something they see on their screens with minimal risk of mistakes.

This brings up another problem with your algorithm. Having a large word list means in that list there are words that ought to look similar (act, apt, aft,...) which means the risk of typos when user writes it down is high and the reason for using a word list is not there anymore.

Another problem is the fact that you limited this algorithm to 128-bit entropy/seed whereas BIP39 entropies can be from 128 to 256 bits.

And biggest problem of all is that this is not exactly a cryptographically strong encryption algorithm. A better method would have been to use an actual encryption algorithm like AES to actually encrypt the entropy/seed and then encode that result however you liked and then stored that instead.

It's called elliptic curve and the private keys are merely numbers so you can perform any kind of arithmetic operation on them as you like (add, subtract, multiply, divide, etc.) as long as you end up with an integer that is between 1 and curve order (N).

As for safety it comes down to how the initial key was selected, if it were random the result will also be safe. In fact this is the method that vanity address generators use.

Sending a submarine to West Asia and publicly announcing it only has domestic use. After the embarrassing performance of US military in Syria after 6+ US bases were attacked by 100+ shells, rockets and missiles some days ago and it made a lot of sound in US media they had to pretend to be doing something and not look weak in the American public's eye. They couldn't do anything real since they knew any respond to those attacks would bring another attack that time with 500+ missiles, etc.

Otherwise these submarines have to be within ~1500 km range which means in Persian Gulf that has a shallow depth in most places and it is not a place to use a nuclear submarine. Not to mention Iran's dominance over Persian Gulf which makes it completely ineffective

Macron's recent statements after visiting Chinese counterpart was pretty funny, he basically confessed that Europe is occupied by US and European regimes are no more than United State's bitch
As for the economy, G7 and Europe as a whole is a thing of the past. The combination of deindustrialization, high energy prices, inflation + recession and most important of all wasting money on US favored proxy war has destroyed their economy.
Not to mention as the economy everywhere else continues growing, specially in places with access to much cheaper energy they will swallow all the money in Europe. In other words this is not just BRICS economy being bigger than G7 at this point, this is also about the fact that capital will continue fleeing Europe in the following years shrinking the economy even more.

1 billion keys may look big when you look at it alone but when it is in comparison in a range such as the 2¹²² key range, it is more like a drop in the ocean.

The sequence of public keys is not going to be useful in solving the problem itself. The only advantage it could give you is to improve your luck, slightly. Meaning when you search for the key you can check each permutation against this list instead of just the funded key and when you find a private key corresponding to a pubkey from that list you stop there and then according to where in the list the key is located (assuming the pubkey list is sorted not randomly stored) you could compute the private key of the funded address.

The only way to find your key is to know that range. If the range is small then you have to check all the keys in that range because what you did (adding a million) is not going to change anything since the start was random.
If the range is huge, there is no way to recover the key.
If you don't know the range is huge, there is also no way to recover the key.

Technically BIP32 can act as a KDF without limit and you can derive as many keys from it as you want but if we are strictly sticking to the standard then there is kind of a hidden limit on the number of keys you can derive using this algorithm which comes from the fact that extended key encoding using Base58 (creating xprv, etc. for main master and child master keys) encodes the key depth as a single byte so it is limited to 256. Each depth uses an index which derives a different key and is a 32-bit unsigned integer ergo it can derive 4,294,967,295 keys. With 256 depth we can only derive a total of 1,099,511,627,520 keys using a single master key. This is far smaller from the number of possible private keys.

Of course we can ignore this limit easily but then it is breaking the standard and the child master keys can not be encoded/decoded using the standard.

I doubt that. Based on what I've seen in my years in this community I can say that majority of people have no idea how cryptocurrencies work. It is not even possible since there are dozens of protocols (thousands of altcoins where they copy a small number of protocols).

In one word: disappointing.
As I always say altcoins lack innovation which is the main reason for their lack of popularity and adoption.

Let's not forget that there is a difference between gold which only exists in physical form and occupies space so it can be found (if they search you) and confiscated physically and bitcoin that only exists in digital form and doesn't occupy any space so it can be hidden very easily and can not be found or confiscated that easily.

By the way the biggest risk in modern dictatorships (aka democracies) is not them kicking down your door and taking your bitcoin by force. It is not even about taking your bitcoins. It is always in a much "softer" way where they convince you to use bitcoin in a "centralized way" so that they can have full control over you (ie. have a leash around your neck while you have the illusion of freedom).

For example when you want to invest in bitcoin, they convince you to invest in a company that promises to buy bitcoin in your place and in return gives you a piece of worthless paper as a contract or something similar.
Or when you want to store bitcoin they convince you to use a custodial wallet where you don't even have access to your keys or your own coins and in return they give you an account.
Or when you want to accept payments they convince you to use a payment processor that monitors and controls all your payments and financial transactions.
And a lot more.

As you can see some of the points I raised above are too familiar because they are already happening!!!

That's only true in fairylands not in reality
In reality the laws can change or even interpreted the way they want it to.

Let's use a better example: social media and VPNs. If you ask anybody in US if social media or using VPN is illegal they will tell you no after laughing at you for asking such a silly question.
The reality is that the authoritarian regime doesn't want you to use anything they can not control (sounds familiar? They can't control bitcoin either) they are making it illegal to use any social media that is not in full control of the authorities in this so called "democracy" where they can censor anything they don't like and not to mention the punishment for using VPNs that are not US and its allies honeypot would be up to 20 years in prison. They ensure these things by passing laws similar to the recent shenanigans with the legislation act 686 with the fancy name "Restrict Act". That's only one of many acts

Things do not look good for the dollar and dollar dependent economies which obviously start from US itself. All the US markets are in crisis mode even if some of them don't show it yet. Apart from dedollarisation the banking system in US is facing crisis partly because of the interest rates that FED has increased and has kept up this long. The defaults are growing and with it banks will eventually go down.

It doesn't stop there either, the stock market and the real estate markets are also in crisis mode in US. Morgan Stanley recently issued a warning about an upcoming 40% crash commercial property prices and a situation worse than the 2008 financial crisis.

That would take decades just like it took decades and some word wars to become the world reserve currency. If I recall everything started from Eisenhower back in the mid 1950's when he started basically forcing people to hand over their gold to the regime.

If gold buying spree was an isolated event then we could argue about other possibilities. But it is not. We have an actual dedollarisation going on which has gotten surprisingly faster ever since I started this topic about 4 months ago. It tells us that all these banks/countries buying up gold at large quantities know of things to come, some from over a year ago.

Also it sometimes feels like they want to turn bitcoin into a solution for everything so I wouldn't be surprised to see someone claim that "bitcoin cures cancer" too! Basically people have been making weird claims like this for nearly as long as bitcoin has existed. Whoever made the claim about Bitcoin stopping wars has no idea how the world works and has probably never read history.

The challenge is that we would be going against strong propaganda centers that have been spreading the FUD about bitcoin through the media that they also control or have tight relationships with. It is extremely hard to counter that because we don't have the same reach.
The only thing we can do is to first educate ourselves and then give those people "facts" about bitcoin with indisputable data.

Bitcoin is a tool so like any other tool it can be used for many different purposes. Just like you can't make a kitchen knife that couldn't be used as a murder weapon you can't create a currency that criminals don't use.

The amount field can technically be treated as an unsigned 64-bit integer which means the max value is 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 which is more than enough for a slight increase in the division, something like shifting the value left and using the extra bits as the fraction of satoshi.

We could come up with a complicated soft-fork that would handle such a thing too. Like adding an extra field (like how we added witness through a soft fork) to handle the extra values (ie. fraction of a satoshi) then round the values down to remain backward compatible.

Read my comment again! As I said, in that scenario bitcoin price in dollar would also go up and it would be be worth $56,000 meaning if you sell that iPhone for dollar and get $1600 you can still buy the same amount of bitcoin 0.02854BTC not more.

I'mt not saying that either. I'm saying that everything has a "value" and because of that value they gain an exchange rate when exchanges for something else. That something can be dollar, bitcoin, gold or groceries! As long as that value remains the same, the exchange rates remain the same too. But if value of one of these (like value of dollar) changes the exchange rate of everything (iPhone, bitcoin, gold, etc.) against dollar would change.

The discussions here are all over the place sometimes
I haven't seen any discussion on the semi-recent decision by OPEC+ countries (that was mostly voluntary) to reduce their production and turn the energy prices back up again. That keeps the pressure on the Western economy up which would also force the deindustrialization of Europe to continue further.

Exactly.
This is why independence of countries and the allies they choose is of paramount importance. The position Yemen (a country that is invaded by the US-Saudi coalition for the past 8+ years) took in support of Palestine from 2200 km away shows that. Meanwhile Ukraine, a US proxy is begging for rockets with more than 300 km range