Eh, that would be the least of our concerns. If 50% of the network turns off, then the block intervals would only increase by 2x which means it would take 10 minutes per block. This wouldn't last all that long; miners could be losing thousands an hour and its unlikely that they are all in the same timezone.
Doubt so. They don't have any motivation to kill the ASICs. They are an ASICs producer and people are going to buy the ASICs from them in the future. They are not going to sabotage themselves by essentially proclaiming to the world that their ASICs are unreliable and no one should buy from them in the future.

IIRC, the worse thing that can happen is that the miner could've been switched off. They can't be used to attack Bitcoin since they could all be pointed at different pools.

It wouldn't make sense for them to destroy Bitcoin for Bitcoin Cash. They essentially run on the same algorithm. Any attacks on Bitcoin would certainly affect Bitcoin Cash. It creates an impression that Bitmain controls any coin that has SHA256D on it. Bitcoin Gold got 51%'d recently though but it was pretty low cost.

It's a lot more possible for pools to execute a 51% attack than ASIC manufacturers. Pools do not earn all that much from operating one.

Bitcoin would likely never be stable. Bitcoin does not function with a central authority and as a result, it wouldn't have any entity backing it up and its purely an imaginary currency. It's not like fiat which has governments around the world backing it. It's fairly open to market manipulation and panic selling due to its lack of security.

As mentioned, maturity can help but it would only help if its not a speculative currency. That's if it ever becomes a non-speculative one. It would take years and years.

If you mean regulation by a complete ban, it definitely wouldn't be beneficial to Bitcoin; the price would tumble by leaps and bounds depending on which country it is in.

Regulation is good for Bitcoin, in general. If they are willing to regulate (not ban) Bitcoin, then it simple goes to show that they recognise Bitcoin as a form of currency and transaction method. If anything, it shows the general public it is legitimate. From past experience, any sort of regulation has a positive impact towards the price of it.

Doesn't add to your credibility but okay.
Are the merit sources the only people that can give merit? Do you think people don't look at them and see who the merits are given to?
Go to any thread on Bitcoin Discussion and try to find a post that is not repetitive or has a decent use of language. You probably won't be able to find any, if any at all. That's the reason why it's so hard for people to rank up. It's literally impossible for me to discuss anything there and expect a response at all.

Yes and so the alts would start thanking each other.
Yes, yes. So no one would be able to interfere with the padding of "thanks" between the multiaccounters. Sure!

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May I suggest a better way to eradicate this problem? Remove every bounty campaign and every campaign that doesn't hold their user accountable for their post. I would guarantee that we won't even need the merit system at all.

The fees has been reduced for months now, where are you getting your information from? The lowest possible fee is about 5 satoshi/byte which is the case for months now. If you use Segwit, the fees should be near negligible.

It doesn't improve Bitcoin's market position. It's touted as a currency that has a lower fee than most payment processors and that is what is expected of it. It's still by no means a currency that can be used to transact however. The only time fees has affected the prices is in the midst of the spam attack, and that's about it.

Can't think of much. If you're in a developing country, you might have an edge if you hold sufficient resources (mining is significantly cheaper in those place). PoW (ASIC resistant algorithm) is possibly the only way that people can mine without huge amount of resources, PoW needs loads more resources.
I think I can re-explain it.

The network doesn't know who is mining and who isn't. If someone is mining, they consolidate the transactions into a merkle root and tries to hash the block header such that it fits the target. Effectively, the only information you need is the hash of the last block and the transactions not yet in the blockchain (ie. unconfirmed). When someone mines a block and the whole network accepts it as valid, the miners on the network will start to mine on the new block, ignoring other blocks at the same height. Hence, if you broadcast the block a minute or two late, every node on the network will simply ignore your block because there is another block that extends the blockchain, such that its proof of work would be the same as your block.

Nodes do, in fact ignore any chain that has a lesser proof of work than the one that they have. If it's the same, they consider the blocks which is relayed to them first.

Obviously, if you can mine faster than all the others, you wouldn't need internet (other than at the start) and your chain would still be accepted. But I'm not talking about it due to obvious reasons.

Not possible. With decentralised systems, there is no way for the nodes to assign specific difficulty to each miner. Nodes do not see miners mining, they merely sees the blocks being relayed to them. Hence, all the nodes would have to have the same target (difficulty) to accept the same blocks. Would be pretty absurd for nodes to connect to every single miner in the world.

The current problem now lies with people who hold too much power. If everyone can mine at the same speed but someone has enough resources, then mining would still be centralised. Each nodes are in fact, already validating transactions, mining or not.
You can. However, there must not be a block that has been mined between the time you go offline and the time that you've solved a block and broadcasted it. Offline or online, the chances of you mining a block is the same. However, your block would be on a fork (effectively orphaned) if a block has been discovered and mined before you. You don't need a huge bandwidth to mine and most miners don't use data networks since they are incredibly expensive.

Ethereum uses a completely different algorithm as compared to Bitcoin. Ethereum's algorithm was pretty much more resistant (not anymore lol) to ASICs as compared to Bitcoin. Everyone can mine Ethereum with profit. Obviously, it has changed now but the technology appears to not be as mature and the cost of the ASICs is pretty high.
That is, of course if they want the attack to last for an extended period of time.

Full validation is only performed when they receive the blocks from their peers. When the client is opened, it only validates the last X blocks and its not a full validation.

In the case of Bitcoin Core nodes, they validate every single block and transaction that they receive. If any of the blocks doesn't follow the network's rule, the node will ignore the transaction. This includes blocks with low difficulty, invalid transactions etc; basically whichever blocks that does not follow the rules of the node. Since nodes does not consider invalid blocks, I can modify the blocks on my computer all I want (if I could) but no one would recognise it. Unless, the way I modify the block makes it such that it will follow their specific set of rules.

In the process of validation, nodes cannot rely on other nodes to give them the correct block hash. This would simply make it vulnerable to loads of attacks.

No. The address will have some form of relations to you. Bitcoins are being sent to an address, not a wallet and the addresses within a wallet is independent of each other. The address would be connected to the transaction forever but it isn't sufficient to show that whoever sent that address definitely (100%) is also the person who initiated the withdrawal from the exchange. The probability is high though.
Could be. You must ensure that the previous address would never be used again by you and all the coins (UTXO) in the address has been spent completely. While mixer could enhance your anonymity, parties can still use Blockchain analysis to try to find the mixer's address.

Electrum is generally pretty bad for privacy since whichever server you connect your client to will be able to see every address in your wallet as well as your IP address. If you want to have as much privacy as possible, you should use Bitcoin Core.

Bitcoin Core is not a master node. Master node mainly exist in altcoins such as Dash and they provide additional functionality as compared to Bitcoin nodes.

Bitcoin's full nodes store the blockchain, validate and relay the blocks and transactions. Bitcoin full nodes form the network but they are not being paid for it. You could get rewards for lightning nodes if people choose to use yours.

They do. They generates the address whenever you unlock your wallet if your keypool is less than X addresses.

If you're pressing New Address in your wallet, you are basically obtaining an address that has been generated in the past from the keypool. The keypool at that time is 100 by default and it is 1000, right now. You will be safe even if you lose your most recent copy of your wallet.dat but you must not have made more than X (100 or 1000) transactions.

Sounds like your wallet isn't in sync. Check if there is still the progress bar on the bottom of the client.

They won't gain from double spending. The block rewards will still be the same, unless the pool owner decides to incentivise them with the profits gained from the double spends. In fact, they could be losing out. Depends on how the community reacts to it, the dishonest chain could be abandoned by them and any block rewards would be gone. Participating in attacks against Bitcoin is essentially equal to them giving the support to kill it. Keep in mind that they own ASICs and they can only be used to mine SHA256D coins. If anything, they would be against these forms of attacks.

I would say that they probably won't have time to switch to another pool by the time the double spends happens.

I'm not really sure but it was just a thought. But take for example, the network has 1000GH/S of hashrate and you are planning to execute a 51% attack so you're adding 510GH/S of hashrate. However, the total hashrate is now 1510GH/S and 510/1510 of hashrate isn't 51% of the total network.

If you don't have 51% of the whole network (ie. more hashrate than the others), you don't have a 100% chance of executing an attack. The honest chain still has a chance of overtaking you and you have to acknowledge their blocks. The probability of success decreases with the number of blocks.

What do you mean by out of sync? Are you on the instance of Bitcoin Core which you've always used to send and receive transactions? If you're not using an external backup and you've never used your wallet elsewhere, your wallet should be in sync.
I don't use OSX but on Windows and Linux, you're specifying a directory to the file.

So it should be something like:

Replacing the directory, of course.

Yes.

Yup. The wallet will then prompt you to add a password (or not). Your wallet will then be able to spend the Bitcoins in the address that you've imported. Do not delete your wallet.dat and remember that you have to save your private keys in order to restore it in the future. There are no seeds for imported keys. If you lose your private key, you can't restore it in the future.
No. Electrum only uses the Bitcoin blockchain. Electrum cannot see any BCH since it does not recognise the BCH blockchain. You can install a Bitcoin Cash client and transfer out your Bitcoin Cash to a Bitcoin Cash (NOT BITCOIN) address. If you don't want to spend it, you don't have to do anything.

Roughly so. If you compare the calculated hashrate against one of the more popular ASICs on the market, the figure stands at about 2 billion. However, this assumes that suddenly half of the network right now goes rogue and decides to attack it. If not, you would need more than 2 billion dollars since the hashrate needed has to be 51% of the total hashrate (after the attack starts).

Its rather resource consuming and it isn't that big of a problem since none of the government really cares that much to spend their budget on attacking a cryptocurrency. You probably wouldn't profit all that much when you attack; doubt exchanges credits more than 2 billion dollars worth of Bitcoin automatically without raising a red flag.

Surprise, surprise. POW does not provide decentralisation of power and control. The power and control of anything can still be centralised with a few entities, if they have sufficient resources. POW is merely a way to distribute coins and to secure the network. POW does not make it such that everyone has to follow what the miner says.
The speed for POS and POW is the same, if the parameters of the coins are the same. You forgot to list the disadvantages of POS. Did you even read the thread?