Good questions and I'm afraid we will have a better answer for them in the future. For now it is worth knowing that China has been slowly pulling out of US economy for months now. A large number of businesses already left US, a lot of Chinese companies pulled out of US stock exchange and investors also pulled their money out.

It is also worth knowing that if they go ahead with the plans to bring Taiwan back to China, most probably US is going to do the same they did to Russia which is to sanction them! In which case US will no longer be "largest importer of their exports" and the incentive to baghold USD is no longer there for the Chinese.

You seem to have forgotten that one of the reasons why Trump was elected was that he promised to pull out of Afghanistan (and similar wars they were losing). Not to mention that Biden didn't remove armed forces from Afghanistan, they were kicked out. They had to even donate $100 billion worth of weapons and equipment to the cavemen known as Taliban to buy their safe passage while they were escaping.

There is definitely an economic war going on which is getting more intense and China has been attacking US in any form they can, so targeting the dollar is always on the agenda.
But unless you can find a more reliable source than Reuters (which is well known for spreading propaganda), I'd say no.

Keep in mind that China only devalues Yuan as long as it keeps their prices competitive not indefinitely. These days that their competitors in other regions (specifically in EU) are struggling with the massively increasing production costs, that gives China a much better advantage where they don't need to devalue their currency as much to remain competitive. The winning of that competition is ensured as other currencies are heavily devalued.

What people forget is that adopting bitcoin as legal tender doesn't mean people are going to embrace bitcoin or for their economy to improve right away. It's all about building the ground work and the infrastructure needed for an easier adoption over the long term. You can't expect a revolution overnight.

That's mostly true during bull runs, specially the long ones like what we had in 2017. But when the bull market stops or when we are in a bear market or in a sideways market, those speculators who want quick profit no longer have the incentive so they go away and "most" people are those who believe in bitcoin itself as a currency with long term potential.

You mean speculation and day traders affecting the price? Of course! Not sure what you are trying to conclude here though.

In short that won't work because of the different PoW algorithms and much higher bitcoin difficulty.

When you are mining a shitcoin like Ethereum that uses a different algorithm (Keccak256) you can't just switch to bitcoin mining that uses SHA256d mining algorithm. Not to mention that ethereum had a much lower difficulty so people mined it using GPUs whereas you can't mind bitcoin with a GPUs, you'll need ASICs which need to be bought and delivered.

There is an ETH ASIC available too but again that ASIC is designed to mine Keccak not SHA256 so it can't be used to mine bitcoin (so ether miners using those ASICs can't just switch to bitcoin).

Most likely all those ETH miners would simply switch to another shitcoin with similar algorithm (like ETC) or a shitcoin that can be mined using GPUs.

But it doesn't matter how many keys you generate from a seed, they all have the same security. Meaning if you generate 1 key using a 12 word seed it has the same security as the 100th key you generate from the same seed.

The seed will have its 256-bit security (assuming 256 bit were generated and used) but the key will still have only 64 bits of security, not more.

That's a bad example because encryption is different and irrelevant in this context. When encrypting something, the message is not the deciding factor in choosing the algorithm, security level and key size.
But when deriving a key, the key size (or better say security level) itself is a deciding factor in choosing the entropy size.

Considering that Trust wallet is closed source, even if you use it completely offline you may still not be safe.

You should never try to invent your own "encryption" mechanism because most of the times they don't provide you with any meaningful security and you would be running the risk of not being able to recover your keys ever again. For example if you forget your "scrambling method", you'd be forced to brute force it by checking 479 million permutations.

BIP38 is designed in a way that brute forcing it be extremely difficult due to the computationally expensive algorithm that is used when encrypting the key. You have to limit your search space as much as you can since even a 5 character long passphrase would take a long time to check. Not knowing the length and type of characters used in the passphrase would make it impossible to brute force.

A while ago an analyst described Europe as that majestic white mare that has a broken leg and while it is on the ground it is surrounded by bears, eagles, lions, even jackals. They are all showing their teeth and claws...
With every passing day, this description looks more real.

In a way what SEC did is admirable (if we ignore the motivation), to punish those who advertise or participate in any form in shitcoin pump and dumps, specifically tokens like the one Kardashian promoted and helped it to scam idiots who follow her.
This is illegal in almost all the countries around the world.

On the other hand, I said it many years ago that the "authorities" who feel threatened by bitcoin will eventually start treating the whole "cryptocurrency" scene that includes bitcoin the same because altcoins are being pumped and dumped and a lot of them are scams.

Unfortunately we can't do much about their FUD about bitcoin except trying to clarify the obvious difference between bitcoin and cryptocurrencies (aka altcoins) for the audience.

The saddest part is that all these crisis have a simple solution, for EU countries to start regaining their independence and to normalize their relations with the Eastern Bloc while NATO stops expanding eastward and promises to stop escalating.
For now US orders them to jump and Europeans ask how high.

Obviously they don't seem to want to do that so things are going to continue getting worse. Energy crisis, Economic crisis, Food crisis, Drug wars and looming threat of nuclear annihilation is going to be the "new normal".

China already declared war on US as a retaliation for Opium Wars that ruined their country many years ago in form of a new Opium War where US is the target this time.
The amount of fentanyl China is shipping towards United States to be used by drug cartels has increased significantly while the drug-abuse crisis in US is getting worse.

It is hard because value itself is mostly measured in terms of fiat and if we measure it in terms of anything else (gold, a barrel of oil, bag of potato, ...) that too can be volatile. But I suppose the best way is to measure it in terms of a combination of goods and services instead of fiat.

For example we can say bitcoin value is stable if your cost of living is 1BTC and remains that way regardless of what happens to the price ($1k to $10k to $100k to $1000k).

We want bitcoin to become stable in value not in price because if its price becomes stable that means its value is dumping over time since fiat currencies are always dumping and a stable price means losing value alongside fiat.

We want stable value because it helps bitcoin adoption as a currency but the problem is that increasing adoption means rising value since bitcoin has fixed supply (unlike fiat). Which is why I think we should first have mass adoption then the stable "value" would happen naturally.

The only people who don't want it are those who thought bitcoin should make them rich overnight.

That's not what centralized means. When you run a full node on your PC you become a "peer", in other words you don't have authority over anybody or anything, you are just an equal to everyone else running a full node.
Being centralized means there is a single central authority making decisions like in case of services such as exchanges where the owner makes all the decisions.

This is not something that anybody can measure because "wallets" don't exist in the protocol. In other words a wallet is something private that contains multiple keys that may not have any connection to each other.

The only thing you can measure is number of addresses being used and their balance (which is not something you could do using RPC calls or a regular node for that matter). The problem with this is that one person/wallet can have multiple addresses so the accuracy of the results regarding adoption decrease.

The only way to do this is to run your own modified node so that it indexes your database based on addresses so that you can search and analyze it.

Block explorers like https://blockchair.com usually have this kind of data which is usually found among their charts.
Like this: https://www.blockchain.com/charts/n-unique-addresses

The difference is that there is still "work" being done on both chains, even the merged mined coin is being mined and it could actually have increased difficulty for it to no longer work as a merged mined coin.
In the PoS case, there is no actual "work" being done, and it is trivial for the staker to benefit from both chains at virtually no cost.

US is one of the beneficiaries but not the biggest, and not just because of the energy sales but everything else that they are selling these days like the arms which they sell at a higher price (eg. the useless Patriot system went for 3-4 million, now it is sold for up to $12 million).

In the long run, it could be bad though. On top of the existing inflation and recession in US, if more countries distance themselves from US, like for example if Germany or the Balkans go to the Eastern bloc and significantly decrease their relations with the West, those benefits start looking like nothing.
Not to mention all the capital that exits US for the destination of other countries with cheap energy and labor like India for example. That could significantly increase unemployment and turn more cities/states into Detroit.

The problem is that at this point sanctions are against all of them not just some.
For example 2-3 decades ago it was just Iran under sanctions, so they could fill that gap in the market with others. But as time went on they kept sanctioning more countries; eventually the number of sanctioned countries became more than the countries that enforced those sanctions!

In a way, today it is US/EU that are under sanctions not the other way around.

The funniest part is that Iran alone could solve all the oil and gas problems that the West is facing. If Iranians decided to remove their sanctions on Europe, 100 million barrels of oil in the storages could be dumped on the European market right away crashing the price below $40 and the production could increase to about 4 million barrels per day ensuring price stays low.
It's not going to happen though since today sanctions against Iran is at an all time high (I believe more than 6000 at this point) while the foreign trade and government revenue is also at an ATH (in at least past 10 years).

So in this new world order, there are two sides. The West has to buy energy at high prices while the East already has a lot of energy and will sell it among themselves at lower prices (eg. China and India buying oil/gas at a big discount).