If you "found" these files on the internet or worse paid for them, they are empty and fake.

99% of the Electrum history, it created a wallet file without any extensions and the content is stored simply as a human readable JSON file. .dat extension is one that bitcoin core and some other wallets use.
Specially if this is a wallet created in those two years, it is impossible to have a .dat extension.

The thing about smart phones is that they are designed to to be connected to some sort of network through different means, with or without SIM. A PC on the other hand is not designed that way and the steps you need to take to make it truly airgap are very simple and short. Your PC doesn't have an antenna by default, it doesn't have Bluetooth by default, or network card or a connected network cable, etc. all of which your phone already has.

The recent statements by the IMF managing director Georgieva paints a bad picture for the world economy in 2023. She claims one third of the world economy is facing recession. "tougher than the year we leave behind, because the three big economies – the US, EU and China – are all slowing down simultaneously," she said.

We should watch China closely, their economy is affected by the recent outbreak of Covid and it is expected to slow down if things get worse. The impact of that on the global economy is going to be massive specially since China is also in an economic war with the West.

Interestingly enough despite majority of economy experts claiming that US economy entered a recession in summer of 2022 and will face recession in 2023, she claims the opposite.

The biggest hit will be on regular people. Something like what happened to US, the 1% controls all the money in the world and middle class is eliminated while everyone falls to lower class. That 1% will remain "European" while their business (all their factories and production) takes place abroad like China and India, that way EU economy remains big while people get poorer.
Like iPhone being basically made in China while it is considered "American" and Apple counts as US GDP while regular Americans are out of jobs!

I covered the reason for Gold price rising. I can't comment on other assets in your area but S&P500 has been dumping, in fact over the past year it got dumped about 20% which is huge in such a heavily controlled market.

The thing about bitcoin is that the market can be easily manipulated and we've had a lot of negative news like FTX collapse that created fake fear and panic sell that crashed the market. But also bitcoin is affected by the world economy and as the economy crashes, more specifically has inflation and recession at the same time, bitcoin price has a hard time going up.

I don't think so.
This has been a trend not something that happened over night. The plans to make EU addicted to Russian gas has been going on for decades, the plans to invade Ukraine has also been going on for at least 10 years.

Same with Saudis, you have to look at the bigger picture. Saudi family did exactly what Russia is doing for the past 8 years but with the help of US. They invaded their neighbor, the poorest Arab country called Yemen to steal their vast energy sources and gain a strong geopolitical status. During during Trump administration the US military proved its inability to protect them against the country they've been invading. So when the invadees started retaliating and hit Saudi oil infrastructure, Saudi military bases and US military bases successfully the Saudi family realized US is too weak to ensure their future survival in the war ordered by US; so they slowly started changing their position and shifted toward East. This is why you see China in Saudi Arabia selling them crap while US complains and expresses "concerns" from afar without doing anything.

All these changes would have happened regardless of who the POTUS is and will continue after sleepy Joe goes away.

That's a weird poll, you should try to keep the number of options low whenever you want to ask a question like this (remember the multi-choice questions have only 4 answers as standard for a reason).

In any case, I think 2023 is going to be the most unpredictable year in bitcoin history. That's mainly because the world economy is unpredictable and many experts are already predicting a worse economy in 2023 and with the escalation of conflicts in different parts of the world (Yemen, Ukraine, Taiwan, etc.) things could get worse specially since the temperatures are dropping fast to unprecedented lows that EU and US were saying "would never happen"! while they have an energy crisis that has also affected their economy which in turn affects bitcoin price.

I chose the second option, because I think we can have a small rise (possibly breaking $20k) but I don't think we can see anything major yet. But 365 days is too long to predict at this time in this chaos.

That's true but you should remember that a project (old or new) doesn't have to be a scam for you to lose money. They simply are pump and dumps and you lose money when you don't accept that they are pump and dumps! For example the biggest altcoins in top 10 list are also pump and dumps since they have no other utility in real world. So when you don't know how to make profit from such schemes you always end up with your pants down during the dump and lose money specially if you are one of those people who decided to bag hold and hope for the recovery instead of cutting your losses and exiting.

To be fair bitcoin is not an asset and was never meant to be an asset. It is a currency that needs to become money hence this much volatility is not good for it at all. The only hope we have is for bitcoin to slowly decrease its volatility and big unpredictable swings, and since so far we have seen that we remain hopeful.

Hacks like this have never been because of a flaw in a cold storage setup but a flaw in the user himself.
In other words as long as a cold storage remains cold, it can not be hacked. For example you can never "hack" my paper wallet I have in my desk drawer but if you invade my home you can steal it now that I told you where it is (hypothetical scenario)!

I'll wait for more solid information on how this hack was taken place but if we assume this is real (not tax evasion ) then as @franky1 said it seems like he infected his wallet on his own, as a mistake.

To err is human!

Wrong.
There was a miner who has been mining in early days and at some point in 2011 they decided to consolidate all their block rewards into one output which they continued to mix/spend from over time. The only reason why that private key (of the already empty address) is known today is most probably because the real owner sold it later on to a shady person on the internet who wanted to pull some sort of scam or possibly used it to claim some shitcoin (like CLAM or something like that) and it got leaked.

At the end of the day an air-gap PC is the safest option compared to both phones and hardware wallets because it is physically disconnected from the rest of  the world whereas hardware wallets are not and phones are extremely hard to made truly air-gap.

The attacks you describe on PC are very complicated and more theoretical than practical specially since the attacker needs to be close to the PC and in some of these attacks they need physical access. Meanwhile there are other attack vectors on hardware wallets that are being connected to a system that could be infected. Granted they too are theoretical but there has been real cases in the past and when comparing it with your examples they are more serious.

It is not as full as they claim it is, specially not when I made that post a couple of months ago because there simply wasn't any way they could have filled them at that time. But you are right that now they have shut down so many industries and reduced energy consumption that they have a higher chance of not facing catastrophe in winter.
I agree with second part too. EU is hurting a lot more than Russia and another reason in addition to what you said is because US is also hurting EU, for example by selling LNG at an extremely higher price and not even fulfilling their promise and always sending less than they promised. On top of that US is exporting its inflation mainly to Europe that is causing a lot more problems.

Lets not forget recession and another major factor affecting the oil price which is China. With the new outbreak of COVID and the way Chinese authorities are slowing down their economy, the demand for oil has gone down hence preventing its price rise. Otherwise if China comes back, price could go back above $100.

I personally don't call it "investment" because it is trading and I don't consider trading as an investment. It is either a job or in case of altcoins it is mostly a gamble.
In any case, 50% is too high if you ask me specially if you are (or for anyone who is) new to the market. I personally set that amount to what I can afford to lose and based on the time I can dedicate to trading since I am usually too busy to spend time in the market. The most important factor to consider is of course the market situation itself. There are times that the market is more predictable than other times and those times are the best for trading. Otherwise when the market is extremely hard to predict (like these days) I prefer staying away.

It is both actually. The biggest example that was made public is Russia that started selling its energy for their own currency effectively replacing US dollar as "international medium of exchange".
There are a lot of other examples like Iran selling fuel to other countries for gold and basically a lot of countries in BRICS and SCO trading using their national currencies.

So far I have seen a lot of solutions including but not limited to gold, each country's national currency, a new currency created by BRICS and even bitcoin. But also so far there doesn't seem to be any agreement on the actual solution to use on large scale.

Exactly. A lot of countries with resources are starting to realize that they had all the power all this time not the colonizers who starve for those resources.

I agree but collapses like this can start slowly and show as weakening at first and then comes the collapse. In has happened in the past, before US introduced Petrodollar and saved its economy US dollar dumped more than 50% in 6 months.

Unfortunately that will never happen in our lifetime. It is the replacement of one centralized currency with another centralized currency. When these countries buy gold one of the reasons is to back their centralized limitless fiat to try and strengthen it and create a strong incentive for others to use it for trades.
On top of that with the new era of CBDCs we are seeing even more centralized fiat (in digital form).

You want to "decode" then you call "encode" method?! Doesn't that return a string instead of bytes? If so, the rest of your code is also wrong since it is not using the decoded base58 but a converted string.

Major reason for the volatility is the demand part not the supply part, in my opinion. That means even if the block reward dropped down to 0 right now, we still continue seeing a very volatile market for the next 5 to 10 years simply because of how bitcoin adoption works. It comes at bursts and a big portion of that adoption is always weak hands thinking they can get rich quick who would also panic sell causing the big swings.

What we see on the price charts is the work of traders and sometimes like the past couple of months the work of market manipulators. It never represents the adoption, not directly anyways. The real adoption is constantly rising which is why the number of addresses holding a certain amount (usually small like 0.1) of bitcoin is increasing since every day new people decide to start buying, specially when they face inflation in their local fiat currency thanks to non-stop printing of it then they see the only currency that has a limited supply called bitcoin.

As for accumulation, it always happens in the dip by long term investors or I like to call it "smart money" that is entering the market at an excellent point regardless of what may happen in short term. We always see them buy the dip silently while everyone else is crying about price not going up.

First of all there is a huge difference between cryptocurrencies (more precisely altcoins) and bitcoin. The altcoins remain widely useless which makes their true intrinsic value be closer to zero regardless of how much they are worth right now. And that will ensure their long term dump which is what we have been seeing from the day altcoin market was created.
On the other hand, bitcoin is useful regardless of how the minority sees bitcoin or how much money they may lose if they buy bitcoin. The true intrinsic value of bitcoin is high and sometimes like these days it is actually higher that the current price. That ensures long term rise.

Secondly the money that was lost over the years has nothing to do with bitcoin as a currency and it has always been about centralized services (mainly CEX) that are insecure and incompetent to keep their customers' funds safe. Talking about that in this context is misleading.

The world continues dumping US dollar, I've already talked about India buying gold and many times about Iran accumulating gold over the past couple of years. Now we have evidence of the other Eastern powers buying large amounts of gold. Many other smaller countries that don't fall into the global geopolitics like Qatar, Turkey, Uzbekistan, some African countries, etc. are also accumulating more gold.
 
This is the New World Order that is forming in front of our eyes, the old Dollar standard is slowly but surely going away which is causing high inflation in US as all the unbacked dollars they'd printed all these years are being dumped on USA itself and even higher inflation is seen in any country that is importing US inflation like Europe. Experts suggest that if US wasn't exporting its inflation, the real US inflation would have been somewhere north of 450% and that's where it's headed as the dollar dumping continues.

I recently watched an analyst who suggested that this is World War 3 which will be fought (at least for now) economically. The East vs. West as the East dumps US dollar that strains US economy. China suddenly lets loose COVID on the world (this past 2 weeks) that is already showing an increase in EU and US. Oil price ends the year with the 2nd straight annual gain and the general high energy prices among other things is slowly rendering EU useless as an economy and industrial power.

Although economy is not the only battlefield (we have energy, food and actual armed conflict between proxies) but it is affecting us the most. It is even affecting bitcoin price as it has successfully prevented its rise to higher ATH last year and even changed its bull trend and crashed the price below the previous (2017) ATH for the first time in bitcoin history.

With that said, 2023 outlook is already bad economically speaking.
How much of the points I raised do you agree with and how do you see 2023 specially when dollar dumping continues?

That has never changed and will never change either! For as long as other cryptocurrencies aka altcoins existed they proved to be worse investments compared to bitcoin specially because whenever bitcoin makes a big move they get dumped which is also proving the traders believe this too since they sell these altcoins to go back to bitcoin market.

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December ended and this poll like the market remained half and half which proves nobody really knows what the real sentiment is and people are mainly undecided considering the global economical situation.