You mean the magnitude 4.7 earthquake affecting Turkey, Iran, Armenia and Azerbaijan? lol
Iran's region includes Khoy, Tabriz, Rasht, etc.

It is Shahed not Shaheed.
It is also not manufactured in middle of a city of Isfahan.
It also was one structure with civilians in it not 5 and it was a terrorist attack using tiny drones (Quadcopter) which interestingly Zelenskly got too excited about and showed support for the terrorists before finding out that it had failed.

It is really eye opening to know where Ukraine stands when it comes to terrorist organizations.
It also gives Iran the internationally supported retaliation. The US bases in Syria were already bombed last week leaving it with 14 casualties, and the company building the Quadcopter is the next legitimate target alongside the terrorist organizations involved in the attack and those who showed support

Turkmenistan is not the most reliable source, their usage is already high enough that doesn't leave that much for exports.
Iran is already selling some small gas to Turkey which Turkey resells part of it to Europe and I don't see that increasing as you can already guess why.
Russia is also already a source for Europe whether through Turkey or other middle countries or through LNG.
Azerbaijan is also not that reliable since the regime in Baku is too unstable and riddled with a lot of problems internally.
One source you missed was the separatist controlled Iraq-Kurdistan but those hopes went up in smokes a couple of months ago when Iraq military took back control over that region...

You are arguing about replacements and you are right. Other fiat currencies suffer from the same flaws as US dollar. But your arguments are confirming my claim that countries are not willingly using dollar!

Yes because the discussions about replacing US dollar didn't start after Russia was sanctions and Russia is not the only country that is seeking replacement. For example both SCO and BRICS are organizations created to oppose the US hegemony (specially economical hegemony). SCO was found in 2001 and BRICS in 2009.
Some of the countries in these organizations like Brazil are not under sanctions.

P.S. El Salvador wasn't under sanctions when they found a replacement for the dollar called bitcoin, they are under sanctions now though

It is not a possibility, it is already happening. But unlike the previous two this may never turn into a large scale armed conflict because everyone and I mean everyone knows that it would lead to nuclear annihilation which is why Russia and NATO are fighting a proxy war instead alongside half a dozen other types of war (economical, energy, food, biological, etc.).

Easily doable using bitcoin and a decentralized platform (similar to OpenBazaar that I mentioned earlier) and with no need for a token. People go on the platform, buy the decryption key using bitcoin and receive it to unlock their song.

LOL
There is a massive pirating world going on that trillion dollar industries haven't been able to "sue" to this day with or without evidence.

The problem you are describing is about centralized platforms and the companies behind them that are taking advantage to make money. The solution to this is to publish their music on a decentralized platform and cut the middle man as you mentioned in the last line. Something like OpenBazaar.

But using NFT is not doing either of those things! With an NFT the artist is still publishing their music on a centralized platform and only creates a token which they claim is linked to that music! So the middle man is still there, they just add an extra step to make additional money by selling an unrelated and useless token.
In simple terms, the music is not the token. The token is just a hash/script or basically an arbitrary data that can not be used itself. Hence why the token itself is useless.

That's nonsense. Full nodes have never been part of the voting process from day one which never changed either. It has always been 1 CPU 1 Vote (aka miner with actual hashrate) not 1 Node 1 Vote. The reason is pretty simple, there is no way to know for sure the IP you connect to is actually running a full node or is faking it or is one of many IP addresses linked to a single node (in other words you can run a single node but with many IP addresses pretending to be that many).

You also seem to be ignoring the history. The first soft fork (with backward compatibility) if memory serves was BIP16 (ie. P2SH) which happened over a decade ago in early days of Bitcoin.

P.S. Your arguments regarding "validation data" is also weak. It is like saying "SPV clients not validating anything is a bullcrap feature" too. It's a good feature that allows users to continue using bitcoin and running a "semi full node" until they get around to upgrading instead of being punished and have everything stop abruptly after the hard fork and be forced to upgrade.

It's interesting to know that majority of altcoins have severe flaws that are only found when their usage grows even by a little. For example you could see their fee rate shoot up by a tiny bit of increased usage like what happened to bcash, ethereum, etc.

Since the USB disk needs to be formatted, you have to create a copy of any data you have on it before you use it for Linux. You would also need at least a 4GB disk for most Linux systems.
A portable hard disk would work too but again the data on it would be lost.

It is more accurate to say it can become too expensive otherwise the 1 sat/vbyte fee that is paid most of the times is not expensive at all and that's the problem. They can abuse this very cheap cost (cheaper than ETH fees) to spam and increase it.

I'm always bullish on bitcoin regardless of what is happening to the price because I see the long term charts not the short term. Imagine you could buy bitcoin at $400 right now, would you not be bullish on it. $400 was the price I started with and it got dumped all the way down to $150 but nobody cares about that now that price is $20000.

As for short term (yearly trend) we have a lot of positive signals that could turn this into a the big bull market that we are very familiar with so the hopes are up. But we also have negative signals same as 2022 but the difference is that they are not new (recession, etc. that has been going on for a year now). So they may not be such big deals.

I'm not very familiar with Australian history but I think it was in the 80's when Australia started moving towards stopping to be a British colony! And that movement damaged the economic relations between Australia and England.
This is a tiny step but similar to the same thing and I believe that is what OP is asking.

BTW it is not just a "cosmetic change", it is a big statement of independence by a nation of 26 million.

Do you honestly think a currency that has been getting printed without them caring about the consequences of the high inflation it is causing to all those countries that have it as "reserve currency" has a valid reason to continue being used by those countries?

I don't think so. In fact from what I've seen no country in the world wants to use US dollar but the problem is that they are forced to use it. A couple of decades ago even Europe tried dumping dollar and get rid of it but they were whipped into submission and were forced to continue using it when US forced Petrodollar nonsense on them.
A lot of other countries over the decades tried dumping US dollar, they were also whipped into submission or got invaded and had their country destroyed.

It is a terrible idea to be left to miners to do such rejections, the correct way is to leave it to full nodes to reject these types of spam transactions just like they do many other types of spam transactions. It also has nothing to do with censorship resistant, etc. and you never see anybody complain about those transactions being rejected!

I repeat what I said in other topics, the Ordinals attack has to be treated as non-standard and full nodes should reject these transactions.

That's debatable. Remember a couple of years ago when fees were so high that everyone was complaining? That was the result of the biggest spam attack bitcoin has experienced in its short history. A big chunk of that spam attack were altcoins spamming the network as a method of mining their shitcoin!
I'd say that is enough harm for us to do something about such attacks like Ordinals on bitcoin before they become a threat.

Not at all. The time it took for its preparation process (proposal, implementation, review, testing, deployment) was longer than most soft forks and the threshold was also the same as other soft forks.

Just because someone is exploiting the new protocol doesn't mean the whole thing should be removed!
Taproot is already offering a lot of things from the Schnorr signatures (aggregated signatures, faster verification, batch verification, etc.) to all the new things we could do with Taproot.

Not to mention that the solution is very simple too. The same way we have been preventing such garbage data to be pushed to the blockchain, by introducing standard rules that prevent such things!
That also doesn't need any kind of fork.
After all this is how we prevented people from doing a similar spam back in 2010 IIRC by introducing standard rules that rejected non-standard outputs (eg. scriptpub that contains the big ass JPG file).

Yeah that's a good suggestion.
I usually suggest Ubuntu because it is a very popular distro and has a general purpose so it is very versatile. The popularity also means you can find any questions you have that are specific to this distro very quickly online.
I also prefer downloading, verifying and installing Electrum myself instead of having it come with the distro. The other problem with Tails is that it is designed to not-have persistence (although you can go around that by putting some effort into it) which is something you need if you are setting up your own storage device.

Some of the standard rules are meant as "soft discouragement" to encourage people to seek better solutions that don't harm Bitcoin (like the OP_RETURN limit). For example the NFT guys could easily create a side-chain that is secure by merged-mining which would in turn provide a much better market (incentive) for miners to make money while securing that side-chain without "attacking" bitcoin.

@BlackHatCoiner raises good points but we should draw the line between being censorship resistant and having no limits and allowing everything. As a matter of fact, Bitcoin is filled with limitations. Limits in consensus rules such as number of allowed sigops, block size (weight), max op count, etc. and a lot of standard rules on top of that such as size of OP_RETURN.
All of these limitations are designed to keep the system healthy and we should fight to keep it that way.

I disagree. US may not have been affected nearly as much as Europe has, but the effects are clearly there. The increased inflation in US, the increased cost of living for Americans and the interest rate that the FED keeps raising to try and slow down inflation but mainly fail.
On top of that US national debt keeps setting new highs every second ($31.5 trillion right now).

US dollar also has no reason to be used.
The replacement depends on who is trading with whom. If for example Europe is trading with Russia, they have no reason to use dollar. They use their own currencies (meaning both Euro and Ruble). Same with China.
If it is the SCO members trading with each other they will use the currency that the organization comes up with. Same with BRICS.

Obviously all of that won't happen overnight but we are heading towards that direction. Many European countries are already paying Russia in Ruble buying their energy (eg. LNG imports).

What is this about that I've seen you mention elsewhere too?

We have spam attack then we have spam attack with an incentive. This is the later.

In a spam attack when someone is pushing garbage into the blockchain (as it is a "freedom protocol") the fee market kicks in and increases the cost for them. They won't have the incentive to continue pushing the garbage to the blockchain.
When there is incentive (meaning a useless token with actual price that they can sell for real money to cover the cost of the spam attack) then the fee market is only harming the real regular uses trying to send bitcoin around since the attacker is earning money to spam the network.

This is not the OP_RETURN discussions at all. This is that altcoin that used to be "mined" by pushing its hash into bitcoin chain. As long as it was being pumped, they spammed the hell out of bitcoin blockchain and as soon as it got dumped the spam died too.

AFAIK it was from back when people were starting to use scriptpub to push arbitrary data with any size to the blockchain. That created chain block and chainstate bloat (the node had to load all that unspedable data to memory). Then they introduced OP_RETURN and its rules as a "prunable output" to be used when you want to push arbitrary data to the chain.