This is the only thing that has left for US and it is called Petrodollar. The funny thing is that all oil producing countries are slowly dumping US dollar too! The latest is Russia that started when sanctioned and now anyone in Europe that buys anything from Russia is paying in Ruble. Even the US colony called Saudi Arabia is slowly dumping USD, the recent Chinese visit there started a wave of political pressure from US to dissuade them from dumping it (we have to wait and see how successful that can be though). Are we going to say hello to Petroyuan? lol

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With China securing more cheap oil and resuming their economy/production, next year would be very interesting regarding the global energy prices and the industries in the West that don't have access to said cheap oil anymore.

This is incomplete/incorrect.

There are two things that are being confused here.
First is consensus rules that dictate what block, etc. is valid and what isn't and second is the miners' preference to include a certain transaction in their block or not.

The consensus rules is something that the miners can't change on their own because if they do that their blocks would become invalid hence rejected by the entire network. That means they can run different "code" but they have to enforce the same exact rules.

But for censorship (refusing to include a certain transaction in their block) they do not need to change consensus rules. It is pretty much the same as how they treat different transaction with different fees (they refuse to include a tx with low fee as long as there are more txs with higher fee).

The way to fight censorship is very similar to the fee situation too. For example if one miner/mining-pool decides to not include any tx with fee rate below 10 sat/vbyte the rest of the world won't follow.
There is no way to prevent miners from censoring transactions but what we can do and have done so far is to have the most decentralized mining system by spreading the miners around the globe. That means if a government in one jurisdiction enforced censorship laws on the miners in their own jurisdiction (eg. US government forcing MARA pool to censor transactions) all the rest of the miners in the rest of the world won't follow that.

It is the same with nodes. Individuals around the world are each running their own nodes and are under different jurisdictions so there is no way to force any kind of laws on all of them regarding which transaction they relay and which they don't.

I have never seen anything solid, it is usually either a misunderstanding of the topic starter or someone just trolling everyone else with their topic. Either case we see things like this semi-regularly. Here is a somewhat similar topic on Satoshi being back because of a signature, if someone doesn't read the replies or if the clarifying answer is overlooked people could believe the title of that topic and remember it years later as Satoshi having signed a message in 2022...

That's because centralization of a cryptocurrency defeats its whole purpose and renders the said cryptocurrency useless. Which in turn means if you bought it and thought it is an "investment", you are actually gambling on a pump that may never come.

The two shitcoins you named are not even cryptocurrencies, they are tokens that have been dumping ever since 2021 and they both had their brief moment in the sun when they were pumped years ago. There is only tiny pumps and eventual demise waiting for them.

Unfortunately that is extremely harmful to the environment and the cost isn't that low either. It destroys the local fish and other sea animals' life (so it also ruins fishing market) and the remainder salt and other impurities has to be disposed usually in the middle of the sea which is costly.

The problem is that you are combining contradicting ideas. Centralized CBDC and fair money printing and new money to cover min rate income over 80 years, etc.
Most of the times when governments print money they are doing it to cover their budget deficit (case in point: Germany these days that is heading towards a record debt; or any country during COVID19 pandemic). In other words as long as we are mixing the cryptocurrency with the existing financial structure there can't be any fairness in it. They need to have full control over how they print more money.

In any other decentralized design we have bitcoin which the supply has to be predefined and can't have unlimited supply with volatile printing rate.

In short P2WSH is encoding a 256-bit hash that is the result of SHA256.

P2WPKH and P2WSH are different.
To create P2WPKH we compute HASH160 of public key (so we have a small 160-bit digest) which is then encoded using Bech32 to get that short address you see.
To create P2WSH we have a "redeem script" which we compute its SHA256 hash (so we have a 256-bit digest) which is then encoded using Bech32 to get that longer address you see.

Yes this is the correct SHA256 digest for that address.

The ice library thing you used doesn't seem to support decoding P2WSH addresses for some reason.
https://github.com/iceland2k14/secp256k1/blob/691e238c4a05c4bc93959fa339df341f24113919/secp256k1.py#L400

The address_to_h160 you called using the P2WSH address should have thrown an exception instead of returning a value since it is meant to decode P2PKH (Base58 encoded) addresses and not anything else.

It is a win-win situation for the FUDsters in the end.
If Binance goes down, they will jump up and down in celebration and will fill the internet with I told you so's. That will also give them legitimacy and future followers whom they can manipulate in the future for their own benefits.
If nothing happens, they will be idiots like hundreds of others who made such claims and will be forgotten until they repeat similar FUD campaign. On top of that they could create fake volatility in the market since they could actually cause some panic among some weak hands like the recent panic sell the moment price went up above $18k which coincided with an increased amount of FUD.

As long as they are getting the reaction they wish for out of the market, their FUD campaigns will keep on coming.

In the end no matter what the policy makers do, it won't help bitcoin or cryptocurrencies. Because if they ban them or the centralized services, the scams won't stop and future FTX like collapses will still happen. And if they heavily regulate the market it still won't help users because such regulations have always been privacy invading type that targets users and they do nothing to provide any kind of security for them so FTX like collapses will still happen!

As long as this doesn't turn into a long term habit where you always check the price, there is no problem with it. It is normal that during the first couple of weeks of adopting bitcoin for you to be worried about the price specially since the market is a bit weird right now.
But if it turned out to be a long term thing, there could be a problem with the amount you'd invested in bitcoin. If you invest what you can afford to lose your concern will also be a lot less.

The downside of private sector is that they work like any other capitalist, when global price goes up they increase local price as well and there is not much the government can do about that. See US for example, they increased domestic gas price in accordance with the global price surge without hesitation.

The government makes their profit by exporting energy at ridiculously high prices to others. The downside of that is that they get addicted to easy money and if that export is disrupted for any reason (eg. sanctions or price fall) they have no clue what to do about budget deficits so they print money and increase inflation (hence the terrible exchange rate).

The wages are low if you convert it to $ due to exchange rate but not when it is compared to cost of living. For example the total of all utility bills I paid last month is barely 1% of what minimum wage salary is. The cost of my bimonthly electric bill was the cost of a small bag of chips.

There are a lot of factors affecting that but being "accessible" is not one of them. For example Iranians usually go for altcoin mining with GPU rigs not so much bitcoin mining with ASICs after bitcoin-GPU-mining stopped being possible.

There has also been a lot of ups and downs over the years. For example when GPU mining was replaced by ASIC mining, many gave up mining altogether. Or two or three years ago when mining started being regulated and many foreigners were kicked out of the country for having illegal mining farms that stole electricity and never paid any taxes; that decreased our total hashrate. Or last year when had a weird electricity crisis for 2-3 months it slowed down the industry's growth.
But the industry is still growing every day, it just takes time for farms to build up.
Additionally the real statistics about Iran's economy is never going to be known, just like nobody knows how much oil we sell and how. Since mined bitcoins are also used officially as one of the currencies for international trades, the official hashrate will definitely not be made public.

My estimate is somewhere around 10% at this point and the mining community is working with the energy ministry to increase their capacity for example by building facilities that could use wasted gas flares for electricity generation, installing more solar panels, etc. and in the next 4-5 years we could easily be looking at a quarter of total hashrate.

You should learn to read the whole post not one word of it. Whatever the real number is won't change anything about the point I was making but here is the reference I used: https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/russia-population/

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-27/four-european-gas-buyers-made-ruble-payments-to-russia
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-05-12/ten-more-european-gas-buyers-open-ruble-accounts-for-payments
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/05/24/eu-russian-gas-putin-rubles/
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/several-european-traders-have-started-pay-russian-gas-roubles-sources-2022-04-28/
https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/news/germany-and-italy-approved-russian-gas-payments-after-nod-from-brussels/

lol
There are two types of 3D printer production lines in Iran. One type is more like assembly lines that import parts and assemble them under the Western licenses so there is no modification involved here and the other type is full production lines that produce a 3D printer and all its parts 100% so there is nothing to modify here either, just pure invention.

It depends on where your destination is and how you are storing those bitcoins. In a lot of countries specially in the Western bloc they will search you and confiscate your hardware wallets.
Hardware wallet was seized by US customs: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5260116.0
I heard similar thing happen in Australia too.
If the person is migrating as a refugee, things could even be worse since most of EU (like Denmark for example) have some sort of "jewelry law" where the police can force you to give up anything worth more than usually a grand. That could include your bitcoins specially if kept on a "physical" wallet.

Decentralized exchanges are growing too but since they are decentralized they aren't really advertised as much as the centralized ones that have dedicated funds for such advertisement so their growth is slower. There is also differences in interfaces and features that may seem less convenient to some hardcore traders. Trading volume in some cases is a factor too.

In that long term things have changed so much that Bitcoin itself may be obsolete because cryptography has significantly changed. Just the cryptography we use today is nothing like what was used during WWI.
What's important is that so far over the past 13 years fees have gone down and despite reward going down from 50BTC to 6.25BTC there was no need for WAY higher fees!

Iran. But don't be surprised, that is what happens when a country has the most amount of resources in the world and the energy sector (basically all utility bills) is owned by the government not the private sector.

Wrong.
With the collapse of MtGox that happened nearly a decade ago, collapse of centralized exchanges became a sure thing. Now if some people have chosen to forget that and think it can not happen to other exchanges (Bitfinex, Cryptsy, Bittrex, Poloniex, ....) that is their own naivete.

To answer your question, Binance could collapse and I have been saying this ever since it started growing and it still wasn't as big as other altcoin exchanges like the scammers called Bittrex. I don't see anything changed except the size of their operation.
However, the current drama about CEXes in the media is 90% FUD.

Unconfirmed transactions have never been safe ever. With or without RBF this fact is not changing and what you insist on calling "attack" is not a thing.

Options that have nothing to do with the consensus rules do not need to reach any kind of consensus.

Nonsense.

I agree with this part. Specifically since we have CPFP option.

Complete nonsense.
Sender is in control of their keys so nobody can censor or seize their funds. The receiver also is not in the possession of the unconfirmed transaction so there is nothing there to censor or seize either. After the confirmation there is still no way to censor or seize the coins that are in their possession since they would control the key.

Complete nonsense.
There is no way to "brute force" any private key by having the signature, one signature or a million doesn't change that.

Complete nonsense. You either didn't read bitcoin's white paper or misunderstood it all, don't just read point #2, continue reading #3 and #4. That is how bitcoin works (confirmed transactions in blocks protected by Poof of Work) not by unconfirmed txs in the mempool based on which one was seen first, in fact this last part is the flaw that Satoshi is pointing out in other systems that bitcoin solves with PoW.

If that becomes a possibility, the same imaginary "state agent" would also mine the block containing the double spent transaction without needing Full-RBF

Exactly.
It may make some sense to use a closed source wallet like Coinomi for certain altcoins or claiming airdrops that don't have any decent open source wallets specially light weight wallets but there is simply no justification for choosing a closed source wallet when we already have good open source wallets for bitcoin.

There is no need to change the protocol or add any more complication. It is easily solved by making bitcoin more decentralized.
In fact any time you are thinking about any of the basic principles of bitcoin (in this case censorship resistance) the same question arises: how decentralized is bitcoin? Because decentralization is the solution to all your concerns regarding these principles.

If one government in one jurisdiction demands censorship in their own country, the rest of the world are not going to follow and as long as all or majority of bitcoin mining power is not in that jurisdiction, their decision won't matter one bit.
Case in point US government having a blacklist of bitcoin addresses they have "sanctioned". They simply can not enforce that on miners/mining-pools because bitcoin is decentralized and the amount of hashrate in US jurisdiction is small.

The bitcoin community also doesn't look kindly to such actions.
Case in point MARA pool. News came out they were censoring transactions, so they were attacked by eveeryone and even their stock price dumped. The small number of miners connecting to their pool (the majority of hashrate is owned by the company itself) left the pool too.
It is going to be the same with any other mining pool that tries going down that road.

Altcoins have always been an experimentation ground for bitcoin. A shitcoin that has copied majority of its protocol from bitcoin changed part of it to a different algorithm. It is a valid discussion to talk about that change.

You still haven't learned that bitcoin is not for one or two countries or a region. It is a global currency and for every country that has some issues or bans bitcoin there are dozens that don't.
For example we have no blackouts here and the electricity price is about $0.002 per KWH. Geographically speaking most EU countries are only as big as one of our average size cities and the whole country is as big as more than half of Europe combined. So even if half of EU were dark (which it isn't since there are only small number of blackouts) it is negated by one country alone. There are a lot of other cases like this.

Bitcoin "transactions" don't go through exchanges. Bitcoin trades to! There is already a hefty tax on trades which has nothing to do with mining algorithm of the coins.

Bitcoin's Proof of Work is the most energy efficient algorithm that exists and it is taken seriously which is evident from the adoption around the world with multiple countries adopting it as legal tender, more as legal currency and the billions of dollars of businesses that are built on top of bitcoin and millions of dollars that is transferred using bitcoin on daily basis.

This is why a centralized shitcoin like ETH that is using PoS and has fees that are above $5 is not useful while bitcoin that has a transaction fee of less than $0.10 is.

No. For forward compatibility the consensus rules have to assume any transaction spending any of the future witness versions (currently anything >=2) are valid by only performing minimal checks. Otherwise any future witness program has to be activated through a hard fork instead of a soft fork.

If the output script is OP_NUM + a single data push with total size between 4 and 42 it is considered a witness program and the interpreter will only check the following 2 if the OP_NUM is anything except OP_0 and OP_1:
1. Signature script of that input is empty
2. Program doesn't evaluate to OP_FALSE

bc1sw50qgdz25j is OP_16 <751e> and since 0x751e is not equal OP_FALSE anybody can spend any coins sent to this non-standard address without needing to provide any signature or anything since witness version 16 is not yet defined (we only have version 0 and 1).
Although because of it being non-standard, almost all full nodes reject such transactions and user has to contact a miner to include them in a block.