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

To add an example, here is the most recent massive hack in case you still think your google account is safe just because your password is long: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/01/05/twitters-latest-hack-is-big-one/
235 million Twitter accounts and the email address and phone numbers connected to them are hacked and the records are being sold online. They exploited a vulnerability in Twitter only found last year.

As far as I can tell metamask looks like the most terrible option! For starters it is only for ethereum based tokens not for any decent cryptocurrency. Additionally it is a browser based wallet, or better said script, which is unsafe by design because it relies on your browser and that is not the safest option to use as a cryptocurrency wallet.

US is both being hurt and benefiting from this conflict at the same time since a lot of things didn't go according to the plan. The best case scenario for US would have been to decrease energy prices so that they don't enter recession themselves but failed to do so which is why the US economy is hurting too even though they reduce its effects by dumping it all on EU. Which is proof that US has no allies, only other countries that they use.

As for the benefit, it is two part. First is destabilizing the world and weakening Russia while US itself is not losing troops since they are fighting Russians through a proxy. And second is their failing military industry that had lost a gigantic portion of the global weapon sales over the past couple of years. When they started the proxy war with Russia, they regained all of that lost profit and more by increasing their prices up to 12 times in some cases and increase the amount of garbage they sell to other countries.

Big innovations like Bitcoin that change the world are always rare. If they happened everyday they wouldn't have been as exciting to watch them unravel. This is one of the reasons why we haven't seen any groundbreaking innovations in this scene.
There is also the problem of greed. Developers at some point started wanting to make money and only caring about profit, so they stopped taking the hard route of invention and started using the simple route of duplication and token creation to make quick and large amounts of money.

There are a lot of ways that an online account can be hacked that doesn't require brute forcing or that much effort. The most common way is stealing users' password through phishing attacks in which case it doesn't matter how long the password were!
There could also be vulnerabilities that are unknown today but found in the future in their servers that could be exploited.

It seems convenient but storing your seed phrase on a cloud service is is one of the most insecure way of seed storage. A lot of things could go wrong for you, from a simple account hack where your password is leaked to bigger catastrophic events where the cloud service itself gets hacked and everyone's accounts and their content is leaked where users aren't even informed for a long time while the company covers it up.

People were saying the same thing about FTX, Cryptsy, MtGox, and a whole lot of other centralized services too (which is what closed source wallets like TrustWallet are like). They were saying "they have been running for X number of days, have Y number of users and Z million dollars go through them; it is impossible for them to run away". The rest is history...

Besides it is not always about the company itself scamming its users, or not all its users (ie. selective scamming), but another risk is a third party hacked exploiting the backdoors in the closed source software that the company has placed in it (intentionally or unintentionally) and stealing your funds. Kind of like Windows where the risk is not only Microsoft hacking you but other hackers exploiting the backdoors Microsoft has placed in their product to hack you.

The solution is very simple, you change the medium. For example use a metal plate instead of paper.
Take a look at this topic that contains useful references and information about a custom setup: Securing Your Seed Phrase with Washers

It can be memorized but it is not supposed to and it is not recommended.
Over long term, it is so much easier and more likely for the seed phrase to be forgotten than your physical storage be lost to something like fire. Forgetting some of the words or their order could lead to complete loss of your funds.

It depends.
Some newbies who never bothered educating themselves about cryptocurrencies and bitcoin do it because they think that is the way to store them! For a very long time I saw people who thought blockchain.info is like PayPal and is the "owner" or "creator" of bitcoin so you have to only use that site if you wanted to use bitcoin!!!
Others who are short term traders do it because they know that altcoins pump and dump nature requires them very quick access to their shitcoins so that they can dump them in an instant instead of having to make a deposit and in some cases having to wait for thousands of confirmation before their account is funded and they are allowed to dump them.

It depends on what happens to Binance after the hack. If people all go away, specially if after the hack another "good CEX" comes along and takes all their customers away, they could go under and won't be able to pay their users.
After all that is what Binance did to the previous exchange that got hacked when they took all their customers away and pushed them under.