Technically there is nothing wrong with that since the keys are the same and derived the same regardless of the xkey's version bytes.
Extended public keys are mainly encoding the key and chaincode. The version bytes at the beginning (leading to xpub, zpub, etc.) wasn't used by wallets/tools pre-SegWit and after SegWit activation it took some time for the new versions to be introduced and adopted by wallets/tools. Consequently some of them were still using their legacy setup (producing xpub) to create SegWit wallets in early days and some may still do.

Such an open attack with a pre-warning is highly unlikely in my personal opinion.
It was more like a warning to force Saudi regime to stop its support of terrorism and shut down its London based media outlet that has been organizing terrorism inside Iran.

More likely scenario is going to be an attack on Saudi energy facilities in at least a month from now by Yemenis whom Saudi regime is already at war with. Just like last time when "they" attacked Aramco and reduced Saudi output by more than half

Banning something that doesn't exist in Europe (ie. bitcoin mining) won't make any difference at all.
Banning something that exists on a small scale in a small portion of the world (ie. US) is also not going to make any difference.

lol it's too late since any country that would have complied with the US sanctions already complied about 4 years ago. There is no country left on US side.
Besides Iran never joined Russia's side, what you are hearing in the media is part of the CIA's Iranophobia project that has been going on for 44 years.

We never have "pumps" we only have "pumps AND dumps" which only happens in altcoins. In which case you should not be an "investor" or a "holder" at all because the pumps always come to an end and are replaced by dumps.

Stick to bitcoin alone...

There is no such thing as "the most useful programming language". All major programming languages including but not limited to C/C++, C#, Python, Rust, Go are good languages that are used for all kinds of applications and purposes. Sometimes it is only a matter of preference to choose a language to focus on. Also you don't have to learn only one language, in fact many major applications use multiple languages or packages from other languages. For example Electrum is written in Python and it uses the cryptography library written in C. Or bitcoin core is written in C++ yet it uses Python for some of its tests.

I personally started with C# because I had a tiny bit of background in Visual Basic and Pascal from years before and I liked the style of it.

Economic growth has nothing to do with whether they allow bitcoin mining or not! Not to mention that the bitcoin market is too tiny in comparison to trillion dollar economy of the biggest economy in the world.
You are also forgetting that their centralized altcoin seems very successful considering the number of users it has attracted and the number of transactions it is handling.

But I agree that they will eventually join the bandwagon. As I said earlier I believe that all the restrictions they have placed on bitcoin are because they wanted to give their govcoin a boost but eventually they too will realize that they can not stop the only existing decentralized money.

Why should you be paid more money just because you own money?

You see just because the existing flawed financial system does that, it doesn't mean it is the right thing to do. As the economy experts are starting to slowly realize, printing more money is the only reason why the global economy is this shitty today.
One of the reasons why Satoshi invented bitcoin was to avoid everything that is flawed in existing monetary system.

Not to mention that what you suggested would ensure inflation in bitcoin. In other words it makes sure that bitcoin would lose its value over time just like any other shitcurrency like dollar, euro, ruble, yen, yuan, etc.

That's putting lipsticks on a pig.

The PoS protocol is fundamentally flawed, finding workarounds for little issues that keep popping up is not going to solve the real issue. The protocol itself has to be replaced by something else. Not to mention that this proposal sounds like it would be spamming bitcoin blockchain!
It also didn't need to use Taproot, it could have been done using OP_RETURN so that the spam doesn't also spam the node's chainstate.

When recovering a wallet without explicitly telling the software the actual derivation path, it has to derive keys at different paths at different depths to find the actual wallet.

Each service is different and should be reviewed separately. Since this is an Electrum board, the Electrum client uses versioned seed phrases which means the derivation path is already known when the wallet is recovered using a seed phrase. If a BIP39 seed is used or a master public/private key that doesn't have that path (like a watch only wallet using xpub) then it uses a feature added in v 4.0.3 called "Automated BIP39 recovery" where it does something similar to what you explained above. You can see it in this pull request: https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/pull/6219

Disruption in the grain shipment is going to increase the pressure on global food situation again and the more the conflict between Russia and Ukraine intensifies as they both use this safe trade route to attack each other the worse the situation is going to get.

The only positive news is that other countries aren't reacting to this like the first time (when they halted exports entirely) so there may not be the same shortage and price rise like that time.

The number of people killed by United States after World War II directly or indirectly using its proxies is placed at approximately 30 million. What's more surprising is that the more I research the more I keep seeing Ukraine's footprints in each of them!

You won't be able to generate traffic for your website this way, not a sustainable one at least. Specially when the articles you are sharing are low quality since they are filled with a lot of mistakes and misinformation.

It is worth pointing out that demand affects price a lot more than the supply in case of a cryptocurrency.
It is pretty easily to compare too. No matter how many bitcoins you think are lost, there is always a lot of altcoins that have a lower supply than the remaining bitcoins. Yet those altcoins are always worth a lot less than bitcoin because of a simple reason: lack of demand. Considering the lack of utilities they provide, there is no real demand for them hence the lower price.

I've only seen exchanges to use such terms to describe what they call "wallet" but they are not wallets since they do own your money and also to get those features (like reaching an elevated account level) you would have to jump through a lot of hoops including full KYC verification, high trade volume, etc. Then they offer you some extra benefits like lower trading fee or something meaningless like that.

That's true but that method would be slightly slower since you would have to wait for confirmation and it can't be automated. But if they are already printed and ready to be sold (like gift cards) you could just visit the shop or use the ATM and buy a bunch.

You have to already have the hash to create your Taproot script and the Taproot address to lock the coins in to be spent later. Since you aim to use a block hash that has not been created yet, it is not possible to do so. There is also no option to fetch a block hash inside the smart contract.

Additionally in bitcoin scripts we don't have the option to compare hashes as integers or otherwise so you can't do the "closest to hash" comparison inside the smart contracts either.

Not on the market but in the queue. And that's the biggest problem.

The demand only went down slightly (and will go down more if more industries shut down).

The supply has gone down because the imports from Russia were significantly reduced while the replacement is almost all in form of LNG which has to be received in LNG terminals and converted before pumped into the pipeline in a very hard and time consuming process. This has made a queue of tankers on the sea waiting to dump their cargo and move to next shipment. That forces the price to go down.

This is exactly like COVID time. The demand had slightly come down while supply was still flowing. So when the terminals reached their capacity they couldn't store the oil anymore and that caused the oil price to become negative for the first time in history (AFAIK). The price of petrol and other oil products were still up though.

That's a little contradictory with some news regarding blackouts in different countries (although the scale is still small) and the warning they issued about possibility of a much larger blackout before Truss left the British office.

The news coming out of Europe has been pretty weird lately.

On one hand the mainstream media celebrated the fact that gas in EU is now worth a lot higher compared to last year by focusing on price not being at ATH (kinda like those who talk about bitcoin price drop after the bubble pops)!

On another hand they claim to have their storages full while the energy dependent industries keep shutting down around EU and the energy sector leaders talk about a severe shortage. Not to mention the power outages that are starting to happen in some European countries.

That's just the best case scenarios out of the 44 European countries rest of which are facing a much worse energy crisis.

That's probably a bad idea considering the wide range of Electrum users. A newcomer may not know what that is and try something that could lead to some fund losses. Features like this are better left somewhat hidden and only for "advanced" users.

Over the past couple of years there has been some rumors and evidences that could lead to the conclusion that countries (specially in the Eastern Bloc) are moving towards a commodity backed currency. One of those commodities is gold. There are some proposals and talks about using energy too. For example when you have the most gas and oil reserves in the world you could simply back your currency with that (essentially something like Petrodollar but for their respective currencies).