Bitcoin is a currency and is not created to be traded for us to care about how much "market share" it has. Specially if by market share you mean market cap ratio which is meaningless anyway.

Most of what? Scamming people by creating tokens and selling a useless digital thing to them?
That is not possible on bitcoin and will never be.

Give us one actual use case of tokens in real world then we talk about whether bitcoin should add this useless feature or not.

Because bitcoin is a currency. You don't see me trading on Forex market either. I earn bitcoin, get paid in bitcoin, pay others in bitcoin. Just like I do with fiat currencies.

So it all comes down to you not understanding the difference between dominance and market cap ratio

Considering that the only versions that I know of in Taproot is the defined Tapleaf versions (currently only 0xc0 is defined) and the fact that OP_VER seems to be pushing the protocol version to the stack (doesn't look like the value depends on the stack itself.), and the fact that Taproot interprets 0x62 as OP_SUCCESS, could you explain what you mean here?

Iran.

My electric bill was extra low because I got a 50% discount on this bill since the amount of electricity I used was lower than same 2 months in previous year (this summer was a lot cooler so less air conditioner).

But generally speaking since my country has the most amount of fossil fuels in the world (among top 3 at least in oil+gas), fantastic geography for renewable energies (wind, sun, hydro, geothermal, etc), growing nuclear power plants, ... electricity has always been very cheap. Other energies have also been very cheap, I actually paid a bunch of bills today and my gas bill was about $1 and my water bill was a little less than a dollar.

I should point out that part of the low price in dollar is the terrible exchange rate Rial has which is why I intentionally used the "bag of chips" for comparison to clarify that generally speaking utility bills are indeed very low here, for example total of what I paid today (electric, gas, water and phone bill) would be barely 1% of the lowest salary in my country.

The rates here are fixed (may change every decade with inflation). And we always pay exactly for the amount we used and usually every 2 months. Some exceptions apply like for those who use a lot of electricity, where the rate goes up incrementally to prevent abuse (BTW this doesn't apply to licensed bitcoin miners, they get a slightly higher but fixed rate which is still lower than anywhere else).
Electricity prices also differ based on the city, for example in the south where it is a lot hotter than closer to north where I live, the electricity price is even lower since people naturally consume more electricity for air conditioners and such.

My data may be a bit outdated since I computed the share last year (~6 months ago) and I basically reversed the amount of tax the government had claimed to have earned from miners to get the total hashrate percentage which put it a little less than 10%. However official statements have claimed it is about 5% at the time and the historical chart at Cambridge Bitcoin Mining Map approves it too but it puts the current percentage at 0.12%.
This makes even less when you consider that Iran has been using bitcoin as payment for international trades and considering trading bitcoin is not regulated, the only way they can receive bitcoin is if they take in form of tax from miners.

The Cambridge thing may be reporting based on news instead of actually computing the percentages. The 5% they reported before was a public announcement and the 0.12% is also related to another news 2 months ago where the government claimed they would be shutting down miners during summer to prevent power outages.
But considering that there has been no power outage until today (third month of summer) and on a Persian forum miners claimed they never received any new regulations telling them to shut down, raises some questions about validity of those stats by Cambridge (not saying they are for sure wrong though since I don't have enough information and the government doesn't really release any clear statistics!).

And I just paid my electric bill for the past 2 months and it was $0.32. A bag of chips is 10x more expensive than that which always makes me wonder why the hell our hashrate isn't higher than 10% yet. There is some regulations involved and some taxes but it is not that bad to discourage major investment in big mining farms.

It's actually pretty funny when you learn that US regime hasn't even been able to win against Iran in their dreams
I'm talking about the biggest military exercise US had to date called the Millennium Challenge where they spent $250 million at the time (about $400 million with today's rate) with 13,500 service members in a massive area of operation and computer simulations to accompany that.

In the first run, US was defeated in 5 minutes. ROFL
They repeated the exercise many more times each time significantly restricting the other team's (Iran) capabilities. They were miserably defeated every time.
They continued this until the commander got too angry about continues defeats that he kicked the operation table and left the whole thing.

https://www.19fortyfive.com/2022/05/how-iran-defeated-the-u-s-military-in-a-war-thankfully-it-was-a-simulation/

That is from early 2000 and it was not even using 1% of Iran's capabilities at full scenario, while it used nearly the full force of US military!

Nobody has ever doubted that the cryptocurrency exchanges have been reporting fake volumes. Some more than others, for example the Chinese exchanges that the Chinese government cracked down on and shut them down were reporting unrealistically HUGE volumes and were actually using it as a covert to launder large amounts of dirty money through their centralized platforms. The other exchanges are doing the same too.

The thing is, you can't calculate how much of it is fake by looking at public data. You have to actually gain access to their internal private data and use that to compute the fake volume and then arrest them for money laundering.
What people at Forbes are doing is simply nonsense and the article is only using technobabble to justify the numbers they reported in their FUD.

You don't necessarily have to be early, just be wise and try to form your own opinion of the market even a wrong one instead of listening to what others try to convince you is correct. For example not so long ago when price was stuck in $3k range you could find countless posts on this forum and elsewhere trying to convince people that price should fall down to $1k-$1.5k. They drew all kinds of lines on their silly charts. We know what happened next when price shot up 2x in no time and soon after it headed for $70k.

Now it's the same, price is stuck in $20k range and you see countless posts trying to convince people that price should fall to $10k-$10.5k! They also draw a lot of lines on their silly charts.

The thing about bitcoin is that we can't predict what it is going to do in short term, but we know it has tremendous amount of long term potential.

As for altcoins, they have never been good for investment. However, they are excellent for short term very high risk trading strategies to take advantage of the pump and dumps they have.

You are making the common mistake of only looking at part of the market and not the whole picture. Each time there is a drop, there has to be something going on. Either a huge rise that happened before the drop or an ongoing downtrend of a bear market.

Take 2021 for example. In July and August price goes up 79% ($29k to $52k) and then in September there is a drop.
Same with 2020.
This is also why in both 2015 and 2016 price is actually going up because the drop already happened and that is the time for recovery.

I'd say 2022 looks more like 2015/2016 considering that the market already crashed and it is time for recovery.

The only reason for any possible future drops could be the fact that people have been brainwashed in recent years to think that whenever US economy falls apart, they should panic sell their bitcoins instead of buying it as the only existing hedge against inflation.
And US economy is falling apart these days...

It depends on a lot of factors that you never mentioned. @aoluain pointed out some of them but here are some more. What kind of debt it is, a bank loan or money borrowed from a family member? How are you supposed to pay it back, all at once or little by little?
I'd say if it is a bank loan and the payments are small you could still pay the loan back little by little and still buy bitcoin with any extra money you are left but if it is borrowed from someone else or you have to pay it back all at once then you should do it before you buy more bitcoin.

Keep in mind that there is always more ways to acquire bitcoin than just investing part of your salary. For example over the past 2 months I have been doing some sort of spring cleaning to sell stuff I have laying around that I don't need anymore, then use that extra money to buy bitcoin.
That way my salary is not touched and the plans I have for that are still intact, meanwhile I still buy bitcoin at the current discount in the dip.

I can't say based on the BIP or the code but from experience I have requested block headers from nodes advertising NODE_NETWORK_LIMITED flag, even the older block headers, by sending a header locator while syncing and they responded with old headers that they shouldn't have the corresponding block for.

This is what all "good" wallets already do so let me add a new idea that would set a new project apart:
The ability to create custom scripts, make payment to them or spend from such scripts. For example something as simple as a time lock script using OP_CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY or slightly more complex conditional scripts using OP_IF.

As far as I know bitcoin core (that has encryptwallet command) creates wallets that only contain a single master key not multiple ones.
Are you confusing child private keys with master keys or is it not even a bitcoin core wallet file?

It also makes no sense that only part of the keys were decrypted and not all of them from the same wallet. Are you sure this wallet is not "modified" manually by someone?

No, you'll need to find the master key that derives all of this and then simply derive all the child keys instead of trying to find them one by one.
Also any decryption method that you used for one of them and worked, should work on all of them if the wallet file is not manipulated.

I sometimes don't understand what the hell they're thinking in CENTCOM. The attacks against their forces has increased 400% according to their own statistics (it is a lot higher in reality) and they decide to respond to only one of them by hitting some launching vehicles, which leads to multiple US based being hit 15 times in total.
Were the body bags worth it? Apparently the oil they continue to steal is more valuable than those troops they keep losing.

Exactly. Unless some politicians go crazy and make some stupid decision. The problem US has is that they played all their hands and they have nothing more up their sleeves. The sanctions didn't achieve what they wanted and they ran out of things they can sanction (there are individuals who have been sanctioned at least 5 times lol). They can't do anything military-wise either since their losses would be massive not to mention that oil price that could go up to $1000.

I don't get why some people always confuse sideways market with a "decline" or bear market. There is none of that. Price is still going up towards $25k and each time it fails to break that resistance it comes back down to $20k to repeat the same thing again.
A decline would be if price continued going down and set a new low every time it did. But it is obvious that price has not been going below $20k for the past 2+ months.

Considering the fact that the output of block #0 can not be spent by design, there is no point for "wallets" to show that unspedable UTXO as part of the wallet content.
It is different for block explorers though since they are showing history and they should add an exception for that output and include it in the history but not show it in the balance.

There are other ways too. Main way to acquire bitcoin is the same way as you acquire any other currency by working for it and getting paid in bitcoin! For example if you own a shop you can sell your goods/services for bitcoin.

Mining has costs, you need to pay for the electricity and keep an eye on cooling the equipment. So you do need to worry about the price. It also means it heavily depends on the electricity price you are paying, if it is low then you can compete otherwise if your electricity costs a lot (like these days in EU) it is not possible to make a profit by mining and you're better off buying bitcoin.

Actually the cost of cloud mining is extremely high since the majority of them are scams or Ponzi schemes and will take your money and run.

A closed source wallet also means people can't not see what "shady things" it is doing!
I wouldn't bother wasting time implementing a new wallet if it is going to be closed source.

Why not?
The best and most secure wallets like bitcoin core and Electrum are 100% open source and we can see how they encrypt things and how they store them. Why shouldn't people see the code and verify its security in your software?

Apart from being open source it has to offer a feature that the existing wallets don't. Something that people need too. You can start a topic asking people what features they are missing in wallets they use.

It is worth mentioning that whenever you check your address or transactions in a block explorer you are associating a lot of meta data with your coins. Keep in mind that these centralized services are storing cookies on your computer (in the browser) and see your IP address and your system fingerprint. There is no reason to think they aren't storing all that.

I thought 288 was a variable that could change at the start.

I mainly had the initial syncing in mind considering that AFAIK pruned nodes store all block headers so they can still provide that to SPV clients that are syncing.

Considering that pruned nodes store chainstate, the SPV clients should technically be able to ask a pruned node if a UTXO is still unspent or receive a set of UTXOs that belong to their address. Although pruned nodes don't support such messages.

"help the network" is a broad spectrum. There is a bunch of things that a bitcoin node does. One of them is to send historical blocks to other peers, which a pruned node can not do.

Other than that a pruned node does everything else:
- It enforces the consensus rules by downloading and verifying everything and rejecting anything that is invalid (eg. an invalid tx sent to its mempool).
- It can validate and relay transactions and help propagate then through the network
- It can validate and relay new blocks and blocks in recent history (like past 1-2 days) depending on the dedicated disk size
- It can show support about changes like soft forks we rarely have
- And of course it helps keep Bitcoin network decentralized
- They can even provide some services to light clients (I don't think they do though, they just can)