The last step of address creation which is encoding it using base58 or bech32 is "hard", the rest is impossible. You won't even be able to complete half a round of SHA256 block compression without making mistakes and there are 64 rounds in one SHA256 computation of a 20-byte input (to compute checksum for base58 address). The rest is thousands and thousands of addition, multiplication, division, bit shifts and shuffles, bitwise operations, and a lot more all on 256-bit numbers, inputs and points (256-bit x and y).

The best way to see all these steps if you want to see the details is to get a library that does this, write a code that calls the method that generates a new random address and use a debugger to step through the code and see each step and the intermediate values.

So far what we had was mostly a "reverse-correction" to pop a "reverse-bubble" (bitcoin was undervalued). This can be the first step of the new cycle where we see a long lasting bull run. Considering last year was filled with crashes and the previous cycle was left incomplete we already have an accumulated demand waiting to enter the market too.

But the price is still going to be affected by the ongoing recessions in many countries and that may make the bull run slightly harder. I say slightly because already most of the weak hands and the "penniless investors" have sold and left the market.

Full scale invasion of Iran in 1980 is not even a tiny bit similar to full scale invasion of Ukraine

In the 1980's Iran was still chaotic after the revolution in 1979. Iran had no allies, no military, no weapons, no money, a very new government, no high ranking military officer with any kind of experience, no defenses, ...
Compared with Ukraine, they have the help of half the world, have unlimited funding and weapons are pouring into Ukraine on top of all the military, intelligence and logistical support Ukraine is receiving.

Iraq (the invader) on the other hand had literary everything; Saddam was being funded by half a dozen rich Arabs with bottomless pockets, he was receiving all types of weapons and ammunition from more than 60 countries, he received and used everything except nukes (for example chemical and viral weapons he kept receiving from Germany and US), he had full support of United States and Soviet Union and Europe (help includes logistical, funds, arms and intelligence), ...
Compared with Russia that is invading Ukraine alone!

This is one of the reasons why it lasted 8 years (not 10 BTW).

P.S. As far as the data shows to this day the largest war after World War 2 is still the Iran-Iraq war.

This is not entirely correct. Saddam was in a lot of debt but he still had continues funding granted he continued invading. Iran on the other hand had no debt since as I said Iran was alone and nobody helped Iran to put the country in debt!
Saddam was also receiving weapons nonstop from the Western powers, in fact by the end of the war Iraq had borrowed loads of fighter jets from UK and France alone not to mention the large shipments of missiles received from US and chemical bombs from Germany.

What was different in the final years of that war was Iran the side that were left completely alone and had to become self sufficient and it did. In final years the Iranian air defense was a serious threat to modern Western planes, Iran's drone industry had been created and reached a very good level capable of performing operations in long distances, the Iranian missile industry was built and reached a good level capable of responding to threats and the navy was mastering the unconventional warfare to the point that in the last 2 years of the war Iran was facing multiple navies from Soviet Union to US and UK and was attacking and sinking them left and right in what is known as The Persian Gulf War.

Wrong.
After that war ended, Saddam did the same exact thing and repeated the same exact aggression.
The only difference was that the invasion of Kuwait was not ordered by US whereas invasion of Iran was. Keep in mind that in 1979 the Iranians booted US and their dictator out of the country and this was kind of US revenge.

Additionally US wanted to take control of the oil rich Iran and Iraq both which is why they had plans to invade the loser of the Iran-Iraq war from day one. It's just that by 1990 the past encounters with Iranian military had left a terrible scar on the US military (honorary mention of the stupidest military operation in human history called Eagle Claw on April 1980) so they didn't want the repetition of it so soon. Which is why they invaded Iraq instead which was in a huge debt, had lost the backing of Arabs since Saddam lost the Iran-Iraq war and his military (unlike Iran's) was mostly depending on foreign aid.

Realistically speaking, the day that 1 satoshi becomes equal to 1 dollar is the day that you can not buy anything with a dollar because of its inflation (unlimited fiat supply), similarly you won't be able to buy anything with a satoshi either.

But if something like that ever happens, we could have a hard fork to change some of the consensus rules regarding the supply and divisibility. A simple shift right one or two positions could be enough and UInt64 used for amounts already has some higher empty bits.

#2 can not happen since you can never mix centralization (fiat) with decentralization (bitcoin).

Only if bitcoin became centralized like altcoins where they could pump and dump it, then they can "push the bullrun button"

From time to time we see a centralized exchange gets hacked or scams people and runs away in which case some people lose their bitcoins. News of that reaching the media creates a wave of other people withdrawing their coins from exchanges to their own wallets.
That's mainly what we've been seeing. It has nothing to do with bullrun, etc.

If anything more coins should move to exchanges during bullruns since trading volume goes up (more people trade) hence more coins have to be there.

They place those limits to prevent spam, after all their computer (server) can only handle so many requests before it hangs. It is going to be the same with an Electrum node, they are not designed to handle too many requests either and I believe they may end up banning your IP.

Generally speaking Electrum is not designed for scaling, it is designed for convenience and ease of use for regular users with small number of addresses to check. Depending on the size of your requests it is best if you run your own indexed node.

It seems to me like the author is desperately trying to convince the readers (and possibly himself too) that the "controversy" that died over a decade ago still exists! This is exactly why he has to dedicate most of the post about the "controversy" itself instead of explaining the proposal!

Is he trying to fake the data here?
Correct me if I'm wrong but a quick and dirty comparison between number of outputs with OP_RETURN (ignoring small possibility of more than on per tx) and number of transactions (look at row count at the bottom) from Jan 2018 to Jan 2019 shows that 8% of the transactions contained OP_RETURN which is nowhere close to 20%!

A short lived peak that is mostly from a completely useless altcoin spamming bitcoin blockchain is also not a good argument to revive this dead "controversy".

In other words it needs another network and rules and side-chains is the place to do all of this!

It is not controversial, it is useless

In other words people are exploiting Taproot for spamming bitcoin blockchain with garbage like back in early years where they placed it simply in the output script at any arbitrary size. Suffice it to say that that spam forced the introduction of very limiting standard rules that prevented such spams and the introduction of OP_RETURN with an 80 byte limit to manage the spam size.

In short all I see here is just an exploit of a protocol (Taproot scripts) that was not meant to be used this way so that they can inject arbitrary data that another self-defined and self-enforced protocol can detect and is not detected or enforced by the Bitcoin protocol. Like a side-chain jammed into bitcoin blockchain instead of having its own chain.

That's not exactly how it worked. As far as I know the IP address (like today) was only used to connect to another node. The address was generated by the other node locally (the same way any wallet generated a new address) and was sent over the network as a response to your request.
Basically:
1. Connect to IP
2. Perform handshake
3. Send request to fetch their address
4. Receive the address
5. Send the amount to that address.

The biggest problem with this method is that bitcoin messages are sent over HTTP (ie. un-encrypted) so anybody can modify them by performing a man in the middle attack.

Practically something like that is not needed since the receiver should see the transaction immediately in their wallet/node as unconfirmed. Additionally "canceling" transactions is not a good option to have although I should mention that any unconfirmed transaction can be "canceled" so to speak (by double spending the inputs).

The closest thing I can think of is for you and the receiver to create a "script" and then make the payment to that script that contains a condition. The only problem is that the receiver has to spend this output to send the coins to their address to prevent you from spending them after the deadline. But it could be useful in some cases like a purchase where you want the purchase to become final but have a deadline after which you can cancel it. It also solves the problem regarding the need for proof of funds.

It is not always about availability, it is also about affordability.

I've said it many times and I say it again: At this point the future of Europe affects the rest of the world a lot more than what happens in other countries specially if it is nothing new like increased mortality rate in Canada due to cold temperatures or increased number of homeless people in US.
If you think stuff happening elsewhere affects the rest of the world, I'd love to read your analysis.

Meanwhile, Europe that is caught between two "poles" and with the way United States is sucking it dry will have a significant effect on the global economy. The less US sucks the economy out of Europe (and a handful of others like Japan) the more inflation they'll export with printing dollar and the more they suck the economy out of them the worse their recession gets which means more capital will flee the continent into the rest of the world.

The energy crisis in Europe is one of the main factors that we can only analyze by its signs in order to be able to get a better understanding of the growing economical crisis and its scale. Namely the effects it has on deindustrialization of Europe (specially energy hungry industries) which is creating "voids" as the industries shrink or shut down. These voids are being filled and will continue being filled by others (now you see how it affects the rest of the world?).

From an economical standpoint it helps all of us make better investments during this chaos while we face inflation and some recession.

3 examples:
1. Car industry in Europe is affected by energy crisis and increased inflation and the recession. Suddenly we see China is silently but quickly growing as a car exporter and some are even saying that in a couple of years it is possible that we stop seeing "made in Japan and Germany" on cars! There are other countries that are taking advantage of this "void", specially among the car part producers. This could be a potential investment opportunity (or shorting opportunity for those knowing which companies have tanked or are going to tank in EU).

2. Another major example I can think of right now is the largest industrial manufacturing company in Europe called Siemens (HQ in Munich, Germany) which is also among the handful of turbine manufacturers. Last year it lost part of its market, had its stock tank by more than 30% (another shorting opportunity) and had to lay off thousands of employees to recover. The voids were filled by others. In long term if they can't continue reducing their production cost (which could mean complete migration to another country like India) they can lose all their market since so far the replacement turbines are superior in cost and lifespan (another investment opportunity).

3. Finally last year the exports of cleaning products from Europe decreased and created a "void". Detecting that and following other news regarding how we were filling that void helped me make an investment in companies that were expanding their production and exports which in turn gave me a nice profit.
I even mentioned this in this board many months ago which people called "Russian propaganda" but as far as I can remember there were a couple of other Asian countries that were taking advantage of that opportunity to fill that void, I suppose anybody else who saw that and make wise investments, made good profit (or shorting opportunity for Europeans if the shares of those companies tanked).

P.S. I didn't even mention Uniper (the German energy giant) that tanked 92% while the German government kept saying everything is fine and there is no energy crisis.

Part of the reason (maybe the main reason) is that Ethereum copied a lot of its ideas and implementations from bitcoin, which means the mining algorithm (PoW) was also part of it. In fact Vitalik was once hanging out in bitcoin circles trying to convince us to destroy bitcoin's smart contract protocol and make it vulnerable like how ethereum's is today. He failed so he created the shitcoin we know today as ethereum.

That sounds more like superstition than speculation since there really isn't any relationship between bitcoin and new years even though each year we see the same before and after them!

As for interest rates increase by the FED, The chances seem high already since they couldn't control inflation the way they wanted to. If they increase it again it would worsen the recession in United States which I don't see how that can be positive for bitcoin in short term, although I have to say those who wanted to sell should have already sold their bitcoins.

The difference is that those people don't see bitcoin price as the defining factor of bitcoin so when price goes down they don't consider it to be "negative times" for bitcoin to lose hope or whatever else. In other words it is not about being hopeful, it is all about understand what bitcoin is and that's a decentralized currency that you use to reach financial freedom not to get rich.

Yes, I encrypt the seed because I need a deterministic wallet not a single key.
I also used the BIP39-type encoding because it returns words and I can write them down with pen and paper otherwise I'd need a printer since writing down a base58 string (what BIP38 does) is hard and making mistakes is easy.

Although the details I changed are minimal but that's a valid concern and maybe I should try publishing the algorithm someday and have others comment on it or just have it on public domain.

Buying bitcoin (not others) is a good idea since we already know that bitcoin was created in the aftermath of 2008 economical catastrophe and we could say that it was one of the incentives that led to its creation. We could see bitcoin soar in the next time 2008 like catastrophe is repeated.

That actually tells us that there was no bans, at least not the way that is reported by the mainstream media. What Chinese government banned were a bunch of things. First was banning centralized exchanges that had 0 trading fee where the exchange was a front for their money laundering operations. Second was banning ICOs back in 2017-ish which we all know were scams and were actually banned in other places too. And finally was the mining ban where they shut down mining farms inside mainland China.

However, as far as I've seen they never banned using bitcoin or trading it.

You shouldn't really try to find reasons for each and every rise and fall. Also what people say on the internet is always all kinds of crazy. They once say new years lead to people dumping bitcoin because they need money for presents and travels, etc. and another time they say it goes up because of new year.

I'm also with @davis196 on this, you shouldn't give financial advice to others so that they can blame you when they lose money specially in a very volatile market. You also shouldn't introduce Bitcoin to others as an investment (which is two birds with one stone), since bitcoin is a currency and people who buy it should want financial sovereignty. Also that way when there is volatility they won't just panic then dump and blame you for the loss since they didn't buy bitcoin primarily to make profit.

That's true.
Here is an idea: how about using the BIP39 extra word? That way you can create two wallets from the same seed phrase. The one without the extra word could contain a tiny amount and the one with the extra word could contain the rest.
In an attack you just give up the seed phrase which they see the funds in and steal like $10 without knowing there is an extension that holds the rest without having any way of extracting it either.

The hardship is about getting it right since there is no standard for it and generally speaking inventing your own cryptography algorithm is not a good idea. I basically got the inspiration from BIP38[1] but instead of encoding the result using base58 I encode it like BIP39 to get words. The salt would add an extra word (128-bit entropy and a 32-bit salt to get 15 words) which could be increased in size to get 24.

[1] https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0038.mediawiki

That's an interesting piece of history that sounds more like an implementation fix or improvement rather than optimization since they had implemented it in a very terrible way at the beginning, downloading it as text and all that. You can literary connect to any full node on bitcoin network and send them a simple getheaders message with a "locator" to receive at least one header and either sync or verify your local headers file. Not to mention detecting chain-splits. All in bytes.
That is basically what the protocol is doing now. It uses hashes and the height alongside a hard coded deep header "checkpoint" to limit the verification.

These wallet softwares don't really need that many "libraries" to install before you can install/run them. For example Electrum only requires python 3 which comes pre-installed with most Linux distros already. So there isn't much time to be spent installing these.

The time consuming part is verifying the authenticity of these which is best done by yourself instead of trusting a distro that won't be popular or reviewed enough. Besides, if you do it a couple of times you should become fast in doing the verification since it is really easy.