Have you been living under a rock or something?
Take your own advice and do some research into all the top secret documents that have been leaked over the years, some that were declassified, etc. to understand how surveillance is working 24/7 in real world. Specially by military organization that I mentioned above.

If you had said "decentralized" money is not real money, that would have made some sense but digital money is what we all use a lot in our daily lives. Fiat currencies that we use changed form to digital a long time ago, unless you are a rare case who has always used hard cash which is unlikely!

These things are created to be centralized and in full control of the government/bank, they will never be built on top of another blockchain as a token. They will always use their own centralized and closed source software and ledger.
I have heard rumors that the one Iran has developed called CryptoRial (which is another project probably unrelated to the one in OP) is using something called Hyperledger Fabric which some claim is shady as hell despite being open source because of the links those involved in the development have (I haven't fact checked this so take it with a grain of salt).

That is too long ago. Try the recent past like from 2019 till today (during COVID19 pandemic and the Russian conflict with NATO) and try trillions printed not millions. For example UK national debt alone grew from about 1.8£ trillion to 3.7£ trillion over past 3 years. This is while between 2016 and 2019 it only went from 1.65£ trillion to 1.8£ trillion.

I'm not sure how to feel about this news, the idiots in our central bank need to get off their printing machines and stop printing fiat to tank the national currency first before they start thinking about creating yet another centralized altcoin.

I don't know about Russia but this is not entirely true about Iran. Although bitcoin is not exactly regulated but it is also not banned in Iran.

Gold is actually being used for a lot of trades over the past 3-4 years at large quantities and over long distances (eg. a plane full of gold bars received from Venezuela for fuel and other stuff Iran sent).

You are overthinking it though. It is just a trend going on all over the world where idiots in banks of all countries are pushing for CBDCs for different reasons. There are hundreds of them in development as we speak!
https://cbdctracker.org/

Speaking of energy bills I saw a tweet from a French citizen who says his bill (apparently for a small pastry shop) has gone up almost 10 times. From 1,630€ to 16,427€ due to the severe energy crisis that Europe is facing.

The bill for November (16427€):

https://twitter.com/AlizadehSamuel/status/1602739828575342592

The bill for December (17780€):

https://www.dna.fr/economie/2023/01/16/patisserie-suzanne-la-facture-suivante-se-monte-a-17-780-euros

P.S. Now the 800% gas bill rise that @Smack That Ace pointed out earlier doesn't seem that big since this case is 990% rise.

CBDC is just the world banksters following a hype trying to keep their relevance in a world that has a decentralized currency called bitcoin. I don't see the point in it and I see even less point in printing stickers and bitching about it on social media because it won't change a thing.

I can only see a possible silver lining which is these centralized altcoins have the potential of replacing centralized shitcoins called stablecoins and reduce the risk they impose on the cryptocurrency market.

I have 3 letters for you: N+S+A

I wonder if the AI (or maybe AD, "artificial dumbass") actually decoded the base58 address and messed up on converting the ones to zeros and and reporting the final hash after removing the initial zeros for being zero ergo enduing up with a 16-byte hash instead of 20.
That's the only reason I can think of for a tool to reject a bitcoin address like 111113DUwES2ZNWSJztA3oBuhzfcdmiaG.

There are certain principles that Bitcoin was built upon like pillars. You can't say if these principles (consensus) are changed things won't fall apart because the result will no longer be Bitcoin as we know it.

Lest we forget, The problem wasn't just that they were arguing for bigger block size, the problem was that they were arguing that block size increase should be the only solution to scaling bitcoin.
Their proposals were also crazy like saying block size should be "unlimited" (eg. 2 TB blocks which later on turned into shitcoins like BSV) or they argued that the miners should have full control over the future of block size and decide whether they want to increase it and how much.

This is why their proposals never got anywhere, otherwise I personally believe that the block size itself should be increased by a hard fork at some point in the future but the main scaling solution should still be a second layer not the block size.

Second layer as the name suggests is a "layer" and like any layers it is made on top of a main "bed" which in case of bitcoin is the main-net and its blockchain. That means second layer is a network that completely relies on the main network it is built on and if the main network has any problems (eg. it dies) the second layer will experience problems (eg. it dies too).
Example: Lightning Network

A side-chain on the other hand is as the name suggests a "chain", a separate chain that has a "link" to another chain but it doesn't completely relies on it. They are usually "pegged" to the main network. That means any problems in the main network may not completely affect the side-chain.
Side-chains can even have their own mining algorithm and a stand-alone blockchain.
Example: Rootstock, Blockstream's Liquid,...

This difference is the reason why 1 LN bitcoin is exactly 1 bitcoin but 1 sidechain bitcoin doesn't have to be 1 bitcoin, it could be 1000 wrapped-bitcoin or 0.5.

You can't just increment h and s!
H is the hash of the message and is not predictable let alone be incrementable and s is computed using k, h, r, d so again it is also no incrementable.

The article also makes little sense to me, since you can't have the same k but different r values since r is computed using k (multiplied by G) meaning r_f should be equal to r already otherwise it is computed from a different k value which means the equations used there are all wrong.

FWIW if HIMARS was used you can't technically call it "pinpoint" strike because HIMARS is a rocket launcher and rockets by definition have lower accuracy since they are not exactly "guided" like missiles and pinpoint accuracy is a much higher accuracy that rockets can not have by design.

AFAIK Russia is also diversifying their energy sales, part of it is still going to Europe directly through gas pipelines and some through LNG exports, part of it is going to Europe through third parties like gas through Turkey and their oil through Iran, their sales are also to China, India, Pakistan and at leas half a dozen other Asian countries, there are also some work being done about installing more pipelines to sell to a couple of other countries in West Asia through third parties.

Generally speaking when a centralized entity enters the scene it is rarely a good news, in this case if these two conditions are true then it is definitely a bad news not just because of the high fee that makes no sense to use this service but also because of the fact that users won't even be buying bitcoin, they are buying something virtual that does not exist but is called bitcoin since they can not withdraw actual bitcoins.

That also sounds scarily like fractional banking where they can even end up selling more bitcoins that exist and if things like this get big (eg. more banks do it) it could even end up affecting bitcoin price.

This is not true.
Some countries are making their own centralized cryptocurrency commonly referred to as CBDC but they are not "going to blockchain".

Not at all.

If the government is creating a stablecoin they must do it on its very own standalone network and possibly blockchain NOT relying on any of the altcoin platforms out there specially if they have a seriously flawed protocol with centralized and mutable blockchain.

Imagine if some day Ethereum foundation decided to freeze your government's funds or reverse their transactions and take over their money because some other government agency put some pressure on Vitalik Butterin!
 
If speed is an important goal blockchain must not even be used.

That's a very broad and vague statement.
Future of what?
Future of money? It is never going to happen. In the foreseeable future fiat will remain the future of money (the same fiat that is not even money). Cryptocurrencies will remain an alternative.
Besides, majority of altcoins are indeed scams and they have no future to begin with. Many of them are dying as we speak and being replaced by other useless coins.

In reality CEXes are never going to do something like that. It's pretty simple, a CEX only exists to make money and they make the most amount of money if they list more coins on their platform. In case of a split (where they have to reject certain blocks) they make the most amount of money if they accept both chains!

Look back to what many exchanges did back in 2017 by listing chains that never even existed like "bitcoin unlimited" and sold virtual coins at virtual prices to people, coins that never existed and were never supposed to even exist!

You should consider that part of Russian exports went underground meaning it won't come up on official reports. Many of it is also still heading towards Europe, specially the Russian LNG. 

Did China really refuse coal imports from Russia or are they just diversifying?
So far I've seen Chinese diversify literary EVERYTHING (coal, oil, gas, raw materials, food stuff, machinery, technology,...) that's true for both imports and exports.
That's what every country must do instead of heavily relying on one source that could abuse that.

The problems start when you start separating different parts of Bitcoin network. You can't have miners without nodes and you can't have nodes without miners. If one group or a sub-group of a group starts forcing something on others, everything will start falling apart.

If a government is printing money to cover part of the cost of gas (and other) bills for home users of part of the population ("price cap") that doesn't mean gas price hasn't gone X% up*, it just means that household users aren't screwed at once. It also means that inflation is also going to shoot up after some time when the effects of that money printing starts showing up like what happened after COVID19 money printing.

* I say X% because I have no idea what the real percentage is. Every source is reporting a different percentage. Eurostats says gas prices for housholds have gone up from 0% (Hungary) up to 150% (Estonia). I've seen other stats like UK Parliament reporting about 200% price rise. I've seen news articles from experts claiming various percentages too.
I've also seen regular people claim their bills have gone up between 8 to 12 times (that's 700% to 1100%). And of course one or two posts on this forum where some users claim the rise is about 50%.
And so on.