They always say "never invest what you can not afford to lose" for any market that you want to invest in. Loans and borrowed money is almost always money that people can not afford to lose even though some may still want to take bigger risks and try their luck in this market, these are the same people who are usually investing in altcoins (aka gambling) their money away.

I agree. The al-Saud family is too dependent on US to do anything against US regime's wish. In fact each time they try to disobey the orders and go "rogue" a bunch of issues are brought up that silences them from their leadership in 9/11 to various human rights violations.

More dangerous than proposals are the people, more specifically the "hooligans" who only create chaos and effectively prevent technical discussion from growing. The best example is 2017 where we saw scores of them on the internet spreading misinformation at the same time. To this day some people think SegWit "removes" signatures from blocks because of it!

Since the last cycle was cut short abruptly and compared to previous cycles that we had was a tiny rise, I no longer thing the 4-year cycle is a solid trend at this point even though we may start seeing another cycle shape up in the future.
For now there are a lot of other events in the world that are affecting the global economy hence affecting bitcoin price which in my opinion are more important to watch than the halving.

There is simply no reason for the price to see another "crash" again specially below the previous resistance which is now a strong buy support. So unless something significant happens to the world economy again, it is highly unlikely to see any kind of major drops.

Whether things are going to be good or bad depends on how healthy the trends from now on are going to be like. A healthy rise where the investors start coming back slowly and buy bitcoin before it shoots up is a good thing but panic buys where price shoots up and creates high volatility is never good.

It depends on what you had and when you sold it. In most cases it is a good idea to sell your altcoins even at a loss because they are not known to go back up again specially when they are coming down from a big pump. But when it comes to bitcoin, the selling part even at a loss is not the problem. The biggest mistake people make is not buying back when they see the trend reversal like these days.

The challenge US faces is not what they are replacing US dollar with, but the fact that they are (or may) replace it. It makes very little difference whether they choose EUR or CNY or RUB, the US economy is alive because of Petrodollar.
Besides Saudi family is not respected in the global scene for any country to use their currency, so far any talks of replacing dollar was with CNY with their Chinese buyers.

The biggest challenge Europe is facing is the competition. A large portion of Europe's economy depends on access to cheap and reliable energy, when that is disrupted (even a little bit) the competition from other countries (like China, India, and a dozen other countries) take over their markets very fast. Hence the deindustrialization of Europe.

I've said this many months ago when they were celebrating the fact that Russia was selling its oil/gas to non-European countries at a big discount. There was nothing to celebrate about because that was the first step of ruining EU economy.
This is why we see today that Europe's economy is at least $1 trillion smaller and continues shrinking while many other countries are expanding their economies.

The same arguments could be made about defeating Russia in any other manner (SRBMs and simple tanks, weak rockets, etc.) in which case I see your scenarios are still valid since a losing Russia could still decide to go nuts and use a tactical nuke since this is not a war Russia can afford to lose.
BTW this is exactly why those who aren't benefiting from this war always suggest a diplomatic solution to this conflict.

Producers of fossil fuel would be the main countries that use them to back their currencies and they don't need storage space since it is already stored in natural storages underground, they just increase/decrease their extraction if they need to.
As for the price, it is going to be challenging but the challenge is not specific to fossil fuels, any asset is going to have volatility and usage of fossil fuels this way could actually decrease their volatility significantly.
As for replacement, I don't see them replaced in our lifetime even electric cars need electricity that is partly generated using fossil fuels not to mention that a huge number of products are being created from fossil fuels which can never be replaced.

Wrong analogy and I strongly suggest you start studying bitcoin to first understand how it works.

Miners don't really make any major decisions, they are merely workers on the network that are "working to get paid". So it is like holding a raffle to hire a different construction worker to place each block for each wall that goes up and pay them for their work.

Then instead of one "boss" overlooking their work, we have tens of thousands of them (ie. Full Nodes) watching over their work to enforce the "law" aka the consensus rules.

Apart from the drama that Franky loves to raise about devs, he is right. The scaling has very little to do with mining algorithm, it is about the block space being limited which exist in both PoW and PoS.
However the flaws in PoS are by design and there is nothing that can really fix them whereas PoW doesn't have those flaws. For example in a PoS coin (specially altcoins) where people store their coins on exchanges and the altcoin exists only on the exchange for trading (aka gambling) the exchange suddenly gains a supermajority power to control the PoS network (which has happened in the past!). Something that is not possible in PoW because by design we have a genius way of preventing such attacks by making them needing to do actual work.

Most people are very open to new innovations in cryptocurrency world the problem is that we are always disappointed because almost everything new we see is a money grab project which is why the algorithms they introduce is also designed to ease their scam not to innovate and solve problems. Example: everything about Ethereum from its conception to help create tokens to scam people to their recent switch to PoS that helps them make money using their 72 million premined coins.

The idea will be first proposed and discussed among the experts who are familiar with the subject (ie. mainly on bitcoin mailing list). Then the developers have to write the code for the proposal and publish it for review (on github) before it is deployed in testing environment (a separate test network) to find its flaws and improve it further.
All these steps can be reviewed by the community too. But in the last step regular users could also test things if they duplicate the code and compile/run it on their own.
Finally after the bugs were fixed and if the change is deemed worthy it will be put to vote.

Your question is too vague and too broad.
Additional consensus rules have been added to Bitcoin over the years such as P2SH, OP_CSV/OP_CLV, SegWit, Taproot,... which means when something useful is introduced the community reaches a consensus over the change and activate it.

The part about "efficient" is vague too, if you mean "efficient mining algorithm" then there is no such thing because PoW is very efficient and is doing what it is supposed to do which is protecting the immutability of Bitcoin blobkchain by increasing the cost of the attacks.
If something comes along that solves all the problems at the same time (not something silly that introduces more attack vectors like PoS), I'm sure the community can reach consensus and activate that too.

I'm a bit doubtful about your claims.
What you call "Big Money" or the whales usually have a better understanding of the market or in other words you can't categorize then as "weak hands". This means they won't pull out of the market in any way that could cause a big drop. Same way they don't enter it in a way to cause a big rise. This is why we see accumulation phases where price is low but the "Big Money" is buying in while everyone else is ignorant.

What has always caused the big jumps and big dumps been weak hands who panic sell and panic buy into bitcoin whenever they see price already reaching a certain level. This is why we still don't see them buy back the bitcoin they sold at lower prices despite the bullish momentum. They probably buy back after $30k is broken at a panic just like how they panicked and sold their bitcoin below $20k.

To compete with something you have to be in the same category, it is like asking if a racing car can compete with a swimmer! They just don't work in the same sport. Bitcoin is a decentralized global currency that doesn't need a middle man while CBDC is the same centralized fiat system controlled by the same centralized authorities and suffers from the same problems (and some additional ones since it is CBDC).

In other words Bitcoin will remain the same alternative solution for those who want to reach financial sovereignty and exit the centralized monetary system even if it is a partial exit.

I generally agree with the subject you bring up that at the end of the day CEX is still useful and people should learn to use it with more caution (at least until better solutions are found and DEXes are improved more) but I don't see the following happening:
There are two problems with this.
1. Even if the exchange has revenues (which they all have) it still doesn't guarantee they won't get hacked or scam their users and run away. So the said proof doesn't solve any thing.
2. Governments don't regulate exchanges to save users. They do it to save themselves! They want full control and surveillance and more importantly taxes, all of which is possible if the CEX enforces KYC and reports all their user activities to the authorities. Majority of the exchanges that have been hacked over the past couple of years were regulated and that didn't change a thing!

To be fair we don't want bitcoin investors we want more bitcoin users to help the ecosystem as the only decentralized payment system. The altcoin investors are also simple gamblers who do more harm than good.

When someone already uses a wallet type, they won't easily switch to another one. So the new wallet has to offer something much better to incentivize the switch. For example some who is using Electrum and has some difficulties with the wallet file (ie. when the file gets big the software slows down) would love to use another wallet that doesn't have the same problem.

Of course the replacement has to still have the main principles needed for a good wallet. Two main ones in my opinion are being 100% open source so that you can verify the code and being semi-popular so that enough users have used it that most bugs have been found and fixed.

It is worth knowing that a lot of those "influencers" do not even own the shitcoins they advertise! It is simply an advertisement for them that they get paid to do by the scammers behind the coin/token. That means the influencer himself is not even at risk when the shitcoin dumps!

That is the way to prolong the war and nothing about it is normal.

The only way to stop an invading force is to hit them where it hurts which is hitting Russian infrastructure on Russian soil.
Look at any other invasion in the history, they never end by fighting the war in the invaded territory. WW2 didn't end because Nazis were defeated in the front-lines kilometers outside Germany or for example the invasion of Yemen stopped the day the armed forces of Yemen managed to attack their invaders' infrastructure inside their own soil (eg. Aramco in Saudi Arabia, UAE airbases and US military bases in the region, etc.).

Of course that is not something that United States would ever allow Ukraine to do which is why they never send any strategically important weapons (eg. MBMs and LBMs) to Ukraine.

I have been saying this for a long time that the world is dumping US dollar as trade currency. This is another piece in that ongoing trend. It won't kill Petrodollar entirely though since US still has many colonies that will continue using dollar including Saudi regime and even Europe. But it will definitely weaken US dollar over the coming years.

As for Saudi reasons, I believe it is just their way of getting some kicks in while seeing US is down on the ground because they won't get any other chance for doing it.
They are also putting this type of pressure on US regime because they are angry with their defeat in their invasion of their neighbor which was backed by US and the billions of dollars worth of weapons US sold them proved to be useless.
This is also why they are getting closer to US adversary China and are even selling some oil to China using CNY instead of USD.

The real question is what would US regime do? Historically they've always invaded and destroyed any country that has tried doing that.....