I see some contradictions here.

1. BIP39 is offering a way to write down your hard to write WIFs in form of a human readable set of words. In other words it is difficult to write down 5KdD6mE.... but it is easy to write down Foo Bar Baz...

2. In BIP39 what you need to back up is one thing but you are actually backing up countless number of your keys derived from it. The alternative here has to "store" multiple things which makes it that much harder.

3. This has a flaw with the form of storage. Digital storage as pointed out earlier is a flawed and less-secure method of storing compared to physical storage (eg. on a physical medium including paper).

4. Someone who is "knowledgeable in Bitcoin" and familiar with BIP39 should be also familiar with BIP39-1 (BIP38) that describes a solid method of encrypting WIFs using AES encryption that is far better than using GPG specially since it is supported by most bitcoin wallets already whereas GPG is not and requires additional software.

Fees coming down, in my book, is when fee enters 1 digit rate. So they haven't actually come down, it is just not as terrible as it once were. Otherwise the average fee since February is 20-ish sat/vb.
And the decline in the number of channels intensified as we set the ATH in fee rate then continued as they remained high.

You can run a LN node just like you can run a Bitcoin node and connect to the network to send/receive transactions. There is no need for a third party.

If you are into building your own cold storage then you should start educating yourself on a couple of topics like what "airgap" means (others already explained) and how to create one. The best and safest solution in my opinion is to dedicate a USB disk to a Linux OS (installed not live) and having your wallet in there.
Here is a very old topic with a step by step guide to create a DIY kind of cold storage: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=853288.0

If this is your first time with Linux, Bitcoin, etc. you can take all these steps and create a TestNet wallet with some TestNet coins which you can get from any faucet out there. This way you don't have to worry about losing money. Receive some coins then send them out to learn how things work.

Yeah, ever since COVID recession, the cycles in Bitcoin world has been broken and market is not acting the way we are used to. So we see "new" things ever day like the last cycle (the one between this one and the 2017 bubble) was cut short abruptly and we never actually had a true ATH/bubble like all the cycles.

Halving rises have always had 2 phases:
1. The pre-halving rally
This is a rather quick and small rise mostly based on hype where market participants emotionally keep buying bitcoin knowing the price goes up. It always ends as we get close to the halving date (usually ~1-2 weeks till halving IIRC). Then there is a correction.
So far things look like before. A big "emotional" rise followed by a correction.

2. The post-halving rally
This is the actual rise which is a lot bigger and it happens because the supply creation rate is actually cut by half (50% reduction) by then and its effects show up in the market and on the price. This starts slower and continues speeding up until we see that big bubble at the end (assuming the same cycle-type thing happens this time).


Considering that we are about 2 weeks away from halving and price doesn't seem to like to rise anymore we can say that the  first phase is priced in.

We all hope for natural growth which is going to be solid and will stick around. But reaching a certain price in a certain time frame doesn't make the rise unnatural. Keep in mind that we have had many massive rises in short periods.
$1 million price may look big but percentage-wise this rise to a million is only about 1300% rise, we had 10 times that rise in last complete cycle ($150 to $20000 which is 13000%).
Getting there in lets say 1-2 years is quite reasonable.

Where did I say that?
I'm just responding to your speculation that "pretty much no one takes bitcoin as payment" with the most solid statistic that can be found which happens to be from centralized services.

Otherwise as I said in my comment above, a lot more transactions are happening on-chain (without these centralized middle men) where a lot or people are taking bitcoin as payment but there is no solid statistic about that because it is hard to analyze.

Lets refresh out memories about their most "noisy" propaganda first.
On 17 October 2023 the Israeli terrorists dropped a heavy bomb on the Al-Ahli hospital leaving 700+ casualties. This angered the whole world so the terrorists started their propaganda campaign that it was a Palestinian rocket! that caused that kind of damage. Like always some people believed this propaganda.
This was debunked a million times ever since like in this work using image analysis and computer simulation. We also already knew that the light rockets Palestinian resistance uses can not do such damage.
We also know today that the Israeli terrorists particularly target hospitals for their population concentration of refugees to get the highest number of casualties in their genocidal rampage; and today there isn't any hospital or any kind of medical facility that hasn't been either totally destroyed or severely damaged by these terrorists.
Their latest crime was against Al-Shifa hospital where instead of dropping a 1 ton bomb to take 700+ casualties they used ground invasion, took hostages and executed hundreds of men, women and children who were seeking asylum in the hospital. And at the end they burnt the hospital as they left

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Back to the title:
5 days ago on 1 April 2024, in an act of terrorism the Israeli air-force attacked a diplomatic building, the Iranian embassy in Syria. Ever since then the Zionist occupiers have been residing in bunkers in fear of the expected Iran's wrath.
This time they started their propaganda campaign early! One particular one that got my attention was the terrorists' mouthpieces talking about Al-Aqsa mosque. If you ask me, they are unknowingly leaking their plans by publishing the propaganda they were supposed to publish later, not now!

As a background for those not familiar with the Zionism cult, they believe that in order for the "end of the world" to begin and for their "savior" to come and save their asses, they need to first destroy the Al-Aqsa mosque that is located in the occupied Quds city.
This is one of the main reasons why the members of this radical cult have been occupying Palestine for the past 75 years.
This is the only ideology I've seen that both believes in Armageddon and actively works in bringing it about! Their belief is that they end up killing everyone who is not a Zionist (which they consider not to be human!) and end up ruling the entire world!!!

We also know the Israeli Zionist terrorists have been planning on destroying Al-Aqsa mosque over the past 7 months and now it seems like the date is getting close and they are trying to use Iran as the scapegoat to take the blame. I personally believe that this was the reason why they committed this act of terrorism against the Iranian embassy that the entire world including the UN security council and even the Western regimes supporting them openly condemned. They wanted to get a response so that they can cover up their attack on the mosque and then start publishing that propaganda I pointed out.

Check out this mouthpiece with links to the Israeli terrorists as an example of the recent propaganda they've been spreading or better say "leaking":
https://twitter.com/Terror_Alarm/status/1776225840696619305
Iranian missiles are known for their devastating accuracy. For example you can clearly see that level of accuracy in the image below with the targets (green circles) hit inside the heavily defended US Air-Base in occupied Iraq called Ein Al-Asad from 8 January 2020. In other words this propaganda is already debunked.


In the end I have to say we know Iran's swift and deadly retaliation is guaranteed, specially after the warning Iran issued to Washington to stand back or become collateral damage. What we don't know is HOW, WHEN and WHERE. So far the speculations have been running wild and I'm just posting this here for historical reasons...

When interest rates are high and going higher, people tend to spend less and not take any more debt on. That means it will only deepen the recession not increase their debt.
As for what this is going to cause, I agree with what you said but only under normal circumstances. In other words the "cycles" you describe will at some point lead to economic collapse before things restart again.

I don't think it is possible to have a significant increase in production anymore. They've already done increasing it. Not to mention the more you extract fossil fuels the harder it's going to get to extract the rest as the pressure drops and the source empties so the production would naturally drop.

That's true, with a hard fork we can fix a lot of bugs weirdness in Bitcoin protocol that would actually increase the efficiency and capacity. The actual size cap increase would also increase the capacity. SegWit2x was flawed, some of which I knew back then a lot more of it I know now.

But my point is that we are always going to need on-chain scaling and can not rely on other solutions like second layer to fix all scaling concerns.

Your speculation isn't backed by data.
The spam attack on Bitcoin under the codename Ordinals got severe mid 2023 (not 2022) and the peak was at the end of 2023 and start of 2024. (click for larger image)
This shows the mempool from January 2022 till today:

It is clear when the fee is the highest!

The following shows the number of LN channels in the same period (the green square shows the same section where the fee is peaking)

Source: https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-channels

From these two charts it is clear that when the Ordinals Attack got worse and caused the biggest fee spike at the end of 2023 and start of 2024, we had the biggest drop in number of LN channels.
Before the attack in 2022 when the fees are almost always low, the number of LN channels is also pretty much a plateau.

That sounds more like declaration of War on Bitcoin 😲
At the very least this is a significant market manipulation attempt and as far as I can tell this would be the first time the US regime is selling seized coins on a centralized exchange instead of auctioning them off-the-market.

The only question remaining is: are they starting to feel threatened by Bitcoin?

Cloud mining achieves none of these. People won't be mining, they won't be getting bitcoins (not for long anyway), it won't contribute to the price rising.
The reason is simple, any cloud mining is either purely a scam Ponzi scheme or will turn into one sooner or later.

We don't want that either. From day one Satoshi didn't create bitcoin so that people can buy it, hold it and become rich! It was created to give people financial sovereignty and that can only be achieved when people use bitcoin not hold it.

Was this an ad?
In any case, it is not a good plan. When hardware improves (for example when ASICs come alone) you can no longer define smaller coins with the same algorithm because they will be 51% attacked due to having low hashrate.
That means if you think you can get people who were mining Bitcoin with GPUs or even first gen ASICs to mine a shitcoin with the same algorithm using the same hardware you should know that anybody with better hardware can attack that shitcoin.

In case you missed the news:
Two days ago 7 members of the U.S.-based food charity called World Central Kitchen (WCK) were traveling in a deconflicted zone in Gaza inside their usual official WCK vehicles with clear brands and signs of their humanitarian group. As they were leaving their warehouse, members of the terrorist organization Israel started a series of attacks on their vehicles.
The seven murdered were from Australia, Poland, United Kingdom, U.S., Canada and Palestine.
https://wck.org/news/gaza-team-update

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The act of terrorism coming from Israel is not surprising. This is not the first time they target humanitarian groups over the past 6 months.
These terrorists have also been doing this for decades in Palestine and in the past 6 months alone according to official statistics they've murdered 33037 innocent civilians most of whom were children. So 7 more victims is somewhat lost among them.

But what sets this murder apart is the fact that these 7 victims actually paid for the multiple bombs that were used to kill them as taxpayers in their own respective countries...

Another way of looking at it is that people haven't adopted Lightning Network as much as some expected because fees were high and sending on-chain transactions were difficult and costly. After all LN is a second layer which means it requires the first layer to perform smoothly so that people can use it like by opening channels easily.

This is why ever since 2017 I've been saying we will always need on-chain scaling alongside everything else we do. This is also why I was a fan of the 2x part of the SegWit2x thing regardless of the other crap that surrounded the proposal.

That was a funny way of campaigning for a presidential candidate

What's funnier is that in a country of over 300 million, Americans are forced to choose between two of the worst candidates of their short 200 year history. Two senile old men both of whom are terrible for everything you can think of from Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies all the way to small domestic issues.

I wouldn't suggest buying shitcoins, specially centralized ones and specially if you are new. You first have to learn to detect pumps and avoid becoming a bag holder who gets dumped on.

As for bitcoin, you have to learn what the risks are in whatever you do and then reach a balance. Buying bitcoin on a centralized exchange and leaving your coins there is risky but also withdrawing is costly. I can't tell you how or when to withdraw because it is a personal thing, you have to see how much risk you are willing to take. I personally won't take such risks and never leave anything above $10 on CEX accounts but others could be more flexible.

It's the same with other solutions other users suggested like Bisq. They come with disadvantages and shortcomings. You have to try them and find out if they can fulfill your specific needs.

Although LN has been advertised by some as a solution to lower fees, it was never that. LN is a scaling solution to allow you to send large numbers of transactions very quickly and without needing on-chain settlement (without needing to wait for confirmation).

Imagine a trader who wants to move their fund immediately to the exchange and sell it. Without LN they'll have to either keep their coins on exchange and risk losing all of it or make a deposit and wait for 1-6 confirmation that can take up to an hour before they can sell. With LN that's a matter of seconds.

Remember last year the false arguments some users were making about OPEC countries reducing production while price drops? That was false because their reduction was supposed to start this year not back then. They just made the decision then and made it public.

Surely enough as they started cutting supply with the start of 2024, the price started rising and in first quarter of this year we are back to $90 a barrel again. Of course there are other contributing factors as I've already covered them multiple times, but this chart clearly shows the effects of that supply cut:

We saw prices below $4k resistance in first quarter of 2020 too. But maybe my time frames are a bit weird because I consider the previous cycle (the one started after the correction from $20k bubble in 2018) to be incomplete so I usually count that bottom as the start of the entire cycle we are still in.

This is what money does to people. We are all looking for it, some more than others and some would sacrifice anything they work for or believe in to acquire it.

A not so interesting side chain of a centralized shitcoin with a mutable blockchain is not worth wasting time on as a developer but it is a fantastic opportunity to make a lot of money from the centralized organization that owns that centralized shitcoin with a massive premine.