Those who claim China is trying to save its own economy are ignoring one simple question: where do all those dollars go?

They won't just vanish into thin air, they go back to United States. Now the increased "supply" means only one thing, more inflation as dollar loses its value.
In other words China dumped an "asset" at its ATH thanks to FED increasing the interest rate and consequently increasing the exchange rate of dollar.

This is as I said another step in the ongoing global economic war.

P.S. Something interesting to point out is that China is filling that small gap left in its economy by abusing the failing EU economy and attracting the investors, companies, factories, etc. US is doing the same but the difference is that China still has access to cheap energy while US is not and US is also hit with inflation and recession.
In any case in this war EU is screwed! It doesn't have that energy, the inflation is high, production cost is extremely high and investors are fleeing. High unemployment rates in near future in EU is very likely too.

It is worth knowing that the Arabs have been making a shift towards Easter bloc for some time now.
I also believe that the recent military drill in Yemen where the armed forces revealed a lot of advanced weapons such as their ballistic missiles with 1500 km range had a much bigger message for the Saudi Khalifah, Bin Salman.

P.S. funny how Saudis had promised US to increase production a couple of months ago and some people believed that nonsense

The problem is that this new China-US proxy war through Taiwan has a high chance of getting others involved. Namely Japan and South Korea and possibly even Australia. NK launching a missile over Japan could  also be a part of that existing tension and to send a "message" of possibility of a much bigger war.

21 million (max supply) is actually not a hard-coded value in Bitcoin protocol. Bitcoin core has some checks included later but the actual max supply is never hard-coded as part of the consensus rules, it is a value that is going to be enforced through math which exists in the block subsidy checks and the halving rules.

As for price, it can never be fixed simply because what we measure bitcoin price in (ie. fiat) does not have a fixed value. For example these days that fiat currencies are dumping hard, bitcoin price is going up against them which wouldn't work if it were fixed (bitcoin would have dumped with inflation ridden fiat).

The scammers are good at abusing the law. Technically it is not stealing to redistribute software released under MIT license with a new license as long as you include the original license, which they do.

The funny thing is that people were complaining about "early mover advantage" back then too and claimed that $200 is too much since they've lost the opportunity to buy bitcoin "cheap". Complaining about the same thing now at $20k isn't any different and they'll do it again in the future when price is $200k and $2 million too, instead of buying bitcoin now!

You should also know that there is a difference between "encryption" and "signing" in asymmetric cryptography.
In encryption the message is not known (publicly) and the encrypted result has an arbitrary length where the person with the private key decrypts to read.
In signing the message must be known alongside the signature and its correctness can be verified by anyone.

We don't use encryption in Bitcoin protocol.

The only reason is that NATO is too weak for any real confrontation with any actual military force despite the fake front they show from themselves. This is exactly why they are involved in so many proxy wars. Besides if they could bomb anyone, they would have bombed Iran in 2020 when Iran conducted what Pentagon refers to as "the largest ballistic missile attack on America in history" that left US with over 900 casualties (140 dead).

It depends on what that growth is.

If it is a fake growth where the printed money is artificially injected into the economy to fake start the economy in recession, that is going to be even worse because it will cause a much bigger recession (eg. 2008).
If it is real growth based on production where millions of real jobs are created for the jobless where they produce actual products to sell for real money, then it is not a bad thing.

Unfortunately the former (fake growth) has been happening in US over the past 40 years (ever since Reagan era).

The code was initially hosted on sourceforge and was only later moved to github which is part of the reason why initial binaries/releases are not found on github. Additionally you can always delete older releases, I don't know if they actually did it though.
You can still find the code from 2009 using git. For example here is the repository at first commit on Aug 30, 2009: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/tree/4405b78d6059e536c36974088a8ed4d9f0f29898

People like OP look at sites like https://bitinfocharts.com/top-100-richest-bitcoin-addresses.html and since they don't even know how bitcoin works they make silly conclusions like this topic.
Most of those addresses with large balances are from exchanges. For instance the biggest on right now is from Binance and it holds 252k bitcoin or 1.32% of the supply that is holding bitcoin on behalf of lots of users. On top of that a large number of addresses (about 25% according to bitinfocharts) are holding dust amounts of bitcoin which swings the percentage towards that 2% OP mentions.
Otherwise the distribution of bitcoin is actually pretty good.

Not directly. By seeding the torrent file you are going to help those who want to download the bitcoin core binaries using torrent network which has nothing to do with bitcoin network.

They promised to implement it but never gave any timeframe and so far it is not yet implemented. You can use hardware wallets that support Taproot with Electrum though.
https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/issues/7544

We have to wait to see what they implement but P2TR is the script name used to describe Taproot outputs so that is possibly how it would work.

Technically you only need the chainstate to verify blocks which is a lot smaller than that, that is what pruning does anyways (with the addition of storing only a handful of blocks). There may even be some ways to pretend to be a full node

It's more accurate to say that miners follow "profit" not demand. For example bcash never had any demand, specially in early days but it could attract a good amount of hashrate simply because they manipulated the difficulty adjustment algorithm so that miners could mine 1000+ blocks per day (for comparison you can mine about 144 BTC blocks/day). So even with the low price and low demand that bcash had, the miners could make more profit in total so they made the switch in that period.

Biden is the best manifestation of America, the shortest lived empire that is currently in its last stage of life. It puts on expensive pretty clothes but internally it is all decrepit. It may die today catastrophically or it could continue living on borrowed time for more years but the inevitable is approaching.

@DrBeer did you even read my comment?! I'm pointing out the only case in history where a nuclear armed nation nukes another unarmed nation and the effects or rather lack of it elsewhere. Where did it even talk about "Russian greatness" and all that other nonsense that you keep repeating in all your posts?!!!

Because democracy and people's vote is only good as long as it gives the result that the big players want (ie. United States), otherwise they oppose it just like what the West is doing these days. It's actually quite funny how Russia used the same "democracy" the Americans always advertise in those regions.

Government prints fiat --> fiat value drops --> inflation goes up
Government prints more fiat --> fiat value drops more --> inflation goes higher
Government prints even more fiat while playing with interest rates --> fiat value drops eve more --> inflation happens with recession

One thing to remember about money printing and inflation is that it doesn't have to happen immediately. For example a part of inflation in US today is because of the money printed in 2020 pandemic.

https://www.usdebtclock.org/ shows the US national debt and how it is constantly going up. It recently set a new ATH at $31 trillion!!!
The site also has a list of other countries, none of them look good.

You should remember the whole story not only parts of it.

Bitcoin price was already rising and Musk's tweet just became viral adding to the existing hype but the media tried to convince everyone that the rise was because of his tweets.
After that when the drop began, he started spreading FUD about bitcoin contributing to the drop and again the media tried to convince people that the drop was because of his tweets!
Finally he tried to spread more FUD about bitcoin and its energy consumption but because price had reached a bottom, all of his efforts failed. This is something the media never told you specially when he was still insisting on his FUD and price kept going back up setting the ATH at $70k.