Something interesting I figured recently was that Europeans are donating their mostly outdated weapons to Ukraine and then buy the replacement mostly from US!

Basically United States economy that has been falling apart was saved temporarily by introducing another Petrodollar (Weapondollar or maybe Armsdollar?) where US starts a proxy war at Europe's doorsteps then forces Europe to donate their weapons to that proxy war and then purchase new weapons at much higher prices than before (eg. Patriot missiles that went for $3-4 million is being sold up to $12 million!) from United States and save US economy this way!!!

It becomes even more interesting when we learn that Petrodollar was also created to f**k Europe when the Europeans decided to dump US dollar when they found out they've been lied to (about it being backed by gold). That dump crashed the failing US economy back then too but it was saved by introducing Petrodollar or better say forcing it on EU and crashing EU economy instead.

You are forgetting a couple of facts.
First of all is that China has been increasing its imports of energy (among other resources) for a long time as they are expanding their economy. So this is not something that started in 2022.
Secondly both of these countries have friendly relationship with Russia. There is not enough benefit in blowing up this pipeline for any of them considering that would ruin that relationship. That's crazy to even consider their involvement.

That is while US doesn't have any relationships with Russia and there is no risk or negative consequences for US regime to blow this pipeline up. There are only benefits. As I said, it's that simple.

That's not a good idea because the only way for that to work is to downgrade to an older version that doesn't have the Taproot code (so it considers it non-standard) so that it stops relaying them. But it will stop relaying ALL Taproot transaction instead of only the spam ones which is not what we want.

The other problem is that your node would also be incapable of verifying Taproot transactions in blocks which means it will no longer be a full node and if everyone does that, the security of the chain is threatened.

But that's not actual demand, that is pretty much like the same thing with a new name or disguise. If you are saying that the garbage being created today is going to lead to more garbage makers coming to bitcoin, then that is not demand and it is exactly the points everyone is raising against Ordinals.

The higher you climb, the harder you fall.

Gavin wasn't some random schmuck who knew about bitcoin. He was a well known bitcoin developer who also had control over the reference implementation project, bitcoin core. Some people may have even considered him a replacement for Satoshi after he went away.

Someone in a position like this needs to be more careful about what he says and does. Otherwise a small slip would lead to a big fall. Supporting the scammer was a big slip, so was the fall.
This is why whatever he does after making the mistake is not going to matter much, specially when it is many years after the mistake.

This works for 99% of the cases where you are using a simple seed phrase with no passphrase and with default English word-list. Anything other than this and things get complicated. For example if you were using a passphrase or if you were using a different word-list like the default French list since the normalization method is different (in this case removes diacritics or accents) your BIP32 seed will be different and you'll end up with a different wallet.
(BIP39 only performs a very simple KD normalization.)

Well, all our governments are printing money so all fiat currencies are tanking without exceptions but with different speeds depending on how much they are printing and a couple of other factors like the strength of the economy of the country.
United States is a special case because it is the only country that exports its inflation at a large scale so when they print money we feel the inflation in our countries too. That's of course as long as we continue using dollar as reserve/trade currency.

You made a bad comparison hidden inside your question. Comparing bitcoin with altcoins like you compare USD with other fiat currencies is wrong because unlike altcoins, other fiat currencies are still useful and their nature is pretty much the same as dollar (unlimited supply, not backed by anything and weak). But altcoins are useless and many of them have severe security flaws.

As for your question, I don't think the centralized system is going away any time soon. With it the [centralize] fiat will remain and dominate the world. When these fiats are replaced they are replaced by another fiat.
But bitcoin will continue growing and continue being used on the global scale as a means of payment and a hedge against inflation.

It didn't require an investigative journalist or any kind of secret information, etc. to know who pulled this attack off. All one has to do is to find out who benefited from this explosion and that is United States.

At the end of the day Russia hopes to normalize its relationships with its "customers" and resume selling them energy to increase the revenue. Blowing up the pipeline would negate that. Not to mention that they could have shut off the valve like they did before on other pipelines!

But think which country has replaced Russia as a big gas supplier to Europe? And who would be screwed if Russia resumed supply gas to Europe like before helping them not-need extremely expensive US LNG anymore?
It is obviously US! It's that simple.

Speaking of US dollar and whether it is reliable (liquid, savable, spendable, etc.) you should also consider that US economy is in a terrible situation itself and things are getting worse every day. It may not show up in form of hyper inflation like elsewhere but it is showing up.
The gigantic $31.5 trillion national debt apart, the US trade deficit is growing at an alarming rate. It is estimated to be almost $1 trillion and growing as US dependence on imports increases as the domestic economy slowly falls apart.

For example US depends on $500 billion imports from China alone (with a deficit of $350 billion in 2021 and $383 billion in 2022) which they keep covering by printing dollar that is losing value rapidly even though the price doesn't show it.
So by all standards we should say CNY is more reliable than dollar at this point!!!

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/07/business/economy/us-trade-deficit.html

You are confusing Taproot with Schnorr digital signature algorithm. Introducing ECSDSA added the ability to aggregate pubkeys and signatures. Taproot is the script that uses this new DSA and offers more capabilities.

That has not changed.

It has nothing to do with safety. Security of both algorithms are pretty much the same.
Read the link in first reply by @witcher_sense, in simple terms it is about the fact that BIP39 lacks certain features such as telling the software what type of address it should derive and at what derivation path (fixed by including a version number). That makes recovery using seed phrase a lot easier for users which is what Electrum aims for (ie user friendliness).
BTW Electrum seed algorithm existed before BIP39.

• OP_RETURN size more than 80 bytes are rejected as non-standard --> bitcoin is permissionless
• More than one OP_RETURN is rejected as non-standard --> bitcoin is permissionless
• pubscript that isn't P2PKH,P2SH,P2WPKH,P2WSH,P2TR are rejected as non-standard --> bitcoin is permissionless
• scriptsig containing extra items (ie garbage) pushed to the stack is rejected as non-standard -- > bitcoin is permissionless
• for years if the OP_CHECKMULTISIG(VERIFY) dummy item were garbage data other than OP_0 the transaction would have been rejected as non-standard --> bitcoin is permissionless
• OP_(NOT)IF conditional not being OP_0/OP_1 and if garbage data were injected instead the tx would have been rejected as non-standard --> bitcoin is permissionless
• Tx with script containing OP_NOPs is rejected as non-standard --> bitcoin is permissionless
• Tx containing OP_SUCCESS, different witness program, Taproot version, etc. rejected as non-standard --> bitcoin is permissionless
• complicated redeem scripts with bigger sizes (eg. containing a bunch of conditionals) is rejected --> bitcoin is permissionless
• ...

---

if we decide to reject Taproot witness containing garbage --> bitcoin's permissionlessness is at risk!!!!!!!!

What kind of logic is that?

Never! Because bitcoin is money and you don't sell money, you use it. That's what you should do with bitcoin too. When price goes up, instead of trying to "dump" it to get your fiat and and then use the fiat you can instead use bitcoin to pay for stuff you need. The adoption has been growing and will continue grow so you will have a lot of options for when you want to spend your bitcoins.

That's different though. Russia is at war with NATO which means such "incidents" are expected. However, Iran is nowhere in this war but they (mainly US) is desperately trying to pull Iran into this war which is why we saw the failed terrorist attack in Isfahan, Iran which out of nowhere Ukraine showed support for!
It won't work though because Iran eliminates threats at the source (US) not the proxy (Ukraine).

This is also one of the reasons why the Western mainstream media keeps lying about Iranian missiles, etc. being used by Russia.

You can't create a OP_HODL transaction using Electrum, it doesn't offer that option (OP_CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY).
https://coinb.in/#newTimeLocked doesn't do anything special either, it is pretty straight forward and you can do it by hand or verify it by hand. Lets say your public key is the following
and the time you want to set is 2023-02-25 10:25 AM. First thing to note is that this is local time not GMT and coinb.in converts that to GMP after fetching your local time. I am at GMT+03:30 so converting that to GMT and then to epoch timestamp gives us 1677308100 that can be converted to hex using a tool like this.
Now all it takes is to construct the redeem script:
Result
Now compute hash160 of this script, add the P2SH version byte and convert it to base58 with a checksum:

But a bull trap shouldn't last this long otherwise it will lose its trap-ness! After all the trend reversal started a month ago and price has had a nice solid rise from $16k to above $20k and stayed there ever since.

By complete accident the Edge Autonomy factory in Latvia which is a US owned drone manufacturer that also exports to Ukraine blew up and is still burning.

To be clear I believe that the New World Order is already established, it is not something that may or may not happen in the future. And we are now in the transitional phase that could last a couple of years, years that will be filled with conflicts and chaos.

Dollar may not disappear but it will definitely lose its dominance and value over the coming years. I agree that sometimes the degree of its fall is exaggerated.

All the characteristics you mentioned (spendability, saveability, and liquidity) depend on whether US likes you to have those characteristics or not. You see, the dollar your country has is not in your country's control! It is in full control of US one way or another and this gives US a tremendous amount of power over your country which they always abuse and they abuse it on all countries, friend of foe alike.

Take Turkey for example. It is considered a US ally and is a member of NATO. They have been playing both sides but after the earthquake which will continue to devastate Turkey between 6 to 12 months and exhaust all their resources, now through dollar US is putting pressure on Turkey to change its policies in favor of US!

Iraq is another example that US recently started increasing the pressure by blocking all their "dollars" that showed itself up immediately in Iraq economy.