People may be beginners in the bitcoin and cryptocurrency world but they are not new to this world and this life! For example someone promising a massive amount of money in return if you pay them something first is a red flag anywhere in the world, using bitcoin doesn't change that! This means anybody who falls for it is gullible in real life and falls for a lot of other things. Hopefully some of them learn from their mistake or mistake of others and don't repeat it elsewhere...

Just because SegWit transactions are cheaper to send, it doesn't mean the legacy transactions cost has increased! The fee you pay for a legacy transaction is the same exact thing as it has been for many years before SegWit was activated.
It is aptly promoted as "SegWit discount" because SegWit transactions cost less.

I don't think it is or will be isolated zones. It's just going to be zones that don't follow the old world order that will be willing to have economical relations with other zones.
For example eventually it could be that Eastern bloc trades internally using an entirely different currency (that is not dollar) and Western bloc does the same but using dollar. Whenever the two blocs want to trade, they come to an agreement on the medium of exchange (could be gold again).
This is what organizations like SCO have been preparing for over the past years.

Not wrong, it's just that a lot of things have changed over the past couple of years.

Iran first saw a huge surge of miners (roughly 2018 to 2021), many of which weren't Iranian and they were illegally mining bitcoin (without licence, not paying any taxes, and worst of all some were stealing electricity so they weren't even paying for that). The video is also from the same period.

Then for the first time Iran experienced an electricity supply crisis that caused blackouts across the country. It had many reasons but one of them were the hashrate surge which forced the government to crackdown and shut down lots and lots of illegal miners.

Slowly things started to change and we had another election as previous government term ended and the mining regulations were solidified too, specially after the new Energy Minister managed to solve the electricity supply issue so they started issuing more licenses to crypto miners, but this time they are trying hard to avoid the same unregulated mess that could lead to unpredictable pressure on national grid.

Finally I should add that although there may be cases I don't know of (like actual Chinese owned mining farms inside Iran) but the most reliable news I can find is from the Ministry of Industry, Mine and Trade that clearly states "no license were given to foreign companies so other countries don't have any direct involvement in mining, but indirectly they can invest in Iranian companies that accept foreign investment". This is a bit old but I haven't seen any changes in the regulations.

The only thing that would happen in the future about any of the older script types is that the wallets will stop generating them by default and possibly even remove the user-friendly option to generate an older script type wallet. Something like what Electrum did where their default wallet is a SegWit wallet instead of letting you go back to legacy that easily.

But they cannot and should not remove the capability of signing (or verifying) transactions that are spending older types of outputs or create such script types. That's because they ARE part of the Bitcoin protocol and can not be removed.

You'd be surprised how many of such people supposedly exist. I know a guy who used to say that his dad works in the Parliament, I recently saw his dad and while we were talking it turned out he is a taxi driver who works in the same street/area as the Parliament

Although existence of a government owned mining farm is not unlikely but I haven't seen anything reliable.

There are not Chinese (etc.) mining farms in Iran. There are Iranian companies involved in mining that have sold some shares to investors from other countries including China.

They don't always need newbies, the biggest part of their funds come from people who get used to certain things like storing their coins on an exchange conveniently being able to sell them in a blinking of an eye or even having open orders with those coins they lock inside an exchange.
So they need to lie and tell these traders that their funds are safe.

The newbie who created the original version of this code which you are using a copy of, gave up trying to steal other people's money since they never found a reused r a very long time ago. This is why the code was never updated to include the SegWit transaction related stuff!! It is unlikely for anyone else to want to waste their time on this.

I'm not the best at reading python but isn't "msg32 = digest(msg).digest()" inside the "_hash32" method performing double hash? The python docs seems to suggest each "digest()" method call performs a single hash and it is called twice here.

You probably broke something when debugging because the signature you posted is valid and it only verifies against the hash I posted above not the one you get from your debug.

Exactly. What I always say is that things that are not in the same category can not be a threat for each other. That is bitcoin and centralized coins (eg. CBDCs). But another way of saying it is things that are in the same category are a risk for each other. "Digital Dollar" or any other form of centralized payment system is a threat to existing centralized cryptocurrencies like stable coins. The day CBDCs are introduced the centralized stablecoins like Tether will start dying because people would start mass migrating to them since as you said they are a lot safer considering governments issue them not some shady company that can be shut down by the government!
Such transition won't affect the market though. It will be a smooth one that affects the company and anybody bag holding their shitcoin.

That's true but the degree and the type of what each country or region faces is very different depending on their "side" and what they have to import. What US faces is different from what Asia faces and what EU faces and even it is different for different EU members (eg. UK is different from Germany and different from Greece, and so on).

For example:
Turkey is facing 90%+ inflation rate because they relied heavily on energy imports and accompanied with a very weak reliant economy led to worse inflation.
What US faces is partly high energy prices partly stupid money printing policy and they reduce it by exporting it which is something other countries can not do.
What EU faces is generally deindustrialization and capital fleeing the region because of high inflation and energy prices which they make worse by printing money.
What India is facing is industrialization and capital entering their country with the inflation being due to high energy prices while Indian economy expands.
...
Although things are a lot more complicated than this but I tried simplifying it to make the point. You see it is not only because of wars, a conflict is a catalyst that is activating 3 years of outrageous amount of money printing ever since Pandemic began.

True. 2022 was both bad and weird. It started after a correction and the market was getting ready to go back up again above $50k and start setting new ATH that FUDs kept pouring in as Russia started invading Ukraine and destroyed Western economy that indirectly affected bitcoin price by causing the bigger crashes. And each time we were trying to recover from those crashes another FUD came out like FTX collapse where people panic sold their bitcoins!

To be "leading crypto mining country" more than 4.5% of hashrate is needed. Although 4.5% is questionable and the truth is the real stats are unknown. It is a growing industry though and I personally speculate it is about 10% of bitcoin mining hashrate these days.

You forgot the biggest and only reason that matters. Iran has the most amount of natural resources in the world. This vast amount of energy has given Iran the cheapest electricity in the world ($0.002/KWH for home users and slightly higher for licensed bitcoin miners).

There are restrictions, but it is not impossible.

Issuing license for mining farms and regulating the mining industry is not the same as being under "direct influence/control" of the government. Any decent country has already applied regulations to such a massive industry specially when it has the potential of putting a lot of pressure on the national electrical grid.

Such lists are never reliable, unfortunately. They usually use the news in the media to build their lists which is always wrong.

As I said, there are restrictions but there is no lack of access.

Wrong. It is not possible to evade sanctions ONLY by using a different form of payment.

Please don't spread lies.

Majority of the banks around the world have issued such bans. A lot of US banks have banned purchasing cryptos over the years too!
Mining, owning and even trading bitcoin are legal in Iran though. But for mining you have to apply for a license which is a simple process that practically costs nothing.

Bitcoin is neither national security nor a threat.
It is always weird when they try to create weird definitions like this.

Countries don't need to adopt bitcoin and probably shouldn't. Whether it is El Salvador or United States. The solution to all the economic problems is also not bitcoin and it definitely won't help the $31.5 trillion US national debt that keeps on rising at scary rates.
Bitcoin is an exit for regular people who don't want to only rely on the centralized and corrupt inflationary monetary system ruled by the banking cartel.

When they print money, they are creating REAL debt.

Almost all the time whenever you find a bitcoin address containing a very large amount of bitcoin (like the one in your screenshot) it belongs to a centralized service that is holding other people's bitcoins (in this case a centralized exchange called Binance).

But it is not unheard of for an individual to own that much bitcoin either, remember that bitcoin price was not always this high and will not remain in this level forever. As it keeps rising, a small amount today would look like a lot in the future. For example the 50BTC block reward was once worth barely $0.5. Many individuals have bought or mined bitcoin those days.

There is no "consequence" of having money! Why would there be? There can only be consequence if the owner advertises it and puts themselves at risk of theft or other types of attacks/harm.

If you already have a malware on your device that can record your passphrase, considering that we are talking about non-custodial wallets, it is trivial for it to also gain access to your storage disk and copy the wallet file and then use that passphrase to decrypt it to extract the seed phrase from that!

When signing messages in order to prevent possible exploits, some additional bytes are added to the beginning of the message before it is hashed twice using SHA256.
- The bytes are the length of the fixed message
- The fixed message ("Bitcoin Signed Message:\n")
- The length of the message
- The message

That means the digest of "Hello, world!" is not 0x315f... but

As for signing, there is nothing special. It is using the same ECDSA algorithm as always, but also returns a single byte that helps the verifier recover only one public from the signature when they are verifying the whole thing.
When encoding that signature it uses the following structure [1-byte-recid][32-byte-r][32-byte-s]

BIP-137 has more explanation: https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0137.mediawiki

Usually all programming languages have some sort of converter that does Base64 conversion, if not finding a library that does base conversion in the programming language you are working with is not hard. For example in C# it is System.Convert.FromBase64String()
Same with Base16 (or hex).

According to Bruegel, a Brussels based think-tank devoted to policy research on economic issues, the estimated cost on Europe for facing this energy crisis has been roughly $1 trillion so far (part of it is money printing and future inflation).
This is on top of all the industries they shut down to reduce the aid the government has to pay to try and reduce that cost and it still is massive.

The energy shortage is still a serious threat too. So far with the industries shutting down it has helped by massively decreasing the consumption (50 billion cubic meters) but the threat is still there since EU doesn't have enough supply or suppliers ("a potential gap of 27 billion cubic meters in 2023"). For example Germany’s network regulator stated in December that "not enough gas is being saved and two of five indicators, including consumption levels, have become critical."
Europe still heavily depends on Russian gas. The smaller amount they directly receive from Russia through Ukrainian pipelines that are being shelled every day and can be cut off at any moment to the LNG they buy from Russia and from Russia through China(!) at higher price that could be cut off too, either by Russians not wanting to sell it or by Chinese using Covid as an excuse to not sell it or if they simply decrease their export levels.
The other risk Europe faces is if other countries start importing more gas creating supply shortage for EU, like Japan that is currently working on a massive "strategic reserve" and plans to increase their LNG imports even more than it currently is.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-18/europe-s-1-trillion-energy-bill-only-marks-start-of-the-crisis
https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/fandd/issues/2022/12/beating-the-european-energy-crisis-Zettelmeyer

You are not a trader if you have bought bitcoin in the past when price was higher than this and are waiting restlessly for the day it goes back up to that price again for you to sell and get your profit! This is NOT trading.
Trading is when you make profit from market movements regardless of their direction (meaning from both rise and fall).
What you did is not an investment either because it seems like you bought without thought and any plans and your only sell plan is seeing the rise to the same previous high.

Well if we get too technical then Bitcoin is not a society and political definitions don't really apply to it.
Also keep in mind that even though many disagree with this definition, Anarchy is always associated with chaos and lack of order which are not true about Bitcoin.

Not voting is a vote too, it is a vote of approval of whatever others choose.
Barlow was also pretty involved in politics and with politicians. He even supported and campaigned for the war criminal Cheney.

They also pay the corrupt traffic cup that pulls them over in fear of being shot. This is exactly why corruption gets worse every year in United States.

P.S. As I said "Independence of Cyberspace" is just pretty words when US sees the Internet as a military organization and runs NSA that is under the Department of Defense and has a 4-start general at its head. Barlow's group EFF can talk about privacy acts all they want and fly their protest blimp over NSA's data center but it won't change a thing since they are not attempting to change the system