This should not be that hard to break considering there is only 228 words and assuming the seed phrase has 12 words only and if you only know the address and/or derivation path. The hard part is writing the code to break it which is only time consuming to get the Fibonacci logic right on this table, then you can check about 300k to 400k permutations per second easily on CPU.
Although you didn't publish neither the address nor the encrypted jumbled words.

I think your calculation may be wrong. The options are a lot more limited than that. If you select the first word the next 11 are selected automatically (the Fibonacci sequence meaning  1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144). So you only have 1 selection from 228 words and you can't select (228-144)th word assuming the table is not cyclical which I don't think it is, meaning you select from 84 words only.
Now you have to multiply that in different directions (rows, columns and diagonal).

I agree that we have a UI unfriendliness problem and a lack certain features. But I disagree with wanting to see all that in bitcoin core project or by their team. Because that would put pressure on those developers and would also grow the project size which would make it harder to review, maintain and update.

Let core be core and let other developers enter the scene and built stuff on top of core or even as standalone projects (like Electrum). That way we have dedicated team to a dedicated feature who don't have to worry about the backend (eg. core) and having to merge all their stuff in their project or having to follow their conventions or even programming language (ie. C++).

For example a C#, Python, Rust,... dev can not contribute to the C++ core (or make any major contribution). But they can create projects on top of core in the programming language they are expert at. That way we are also expanding the development circle hence making bitcoin even more decentralized.

The good news for bitcoin is that the governments in US and EU have been printing money nonstop which only means one thing: inflation. Whenever inflation happens and fiat money loses its value, it is an excellent news for bitcoin because not only it automatically increases bitcoin price but also helps more people around the world realize why a deflationary currency is a good thing to have so it also increases bitcoin adoption hence increasing bitcoin value.

Didn't they already release a large percentage of their strategic reserves? I think it was about 40% to 50% of the it dumped on the market to decrease the price. Right now about 300 million barrels remaining and US consumes 19 million barrels per day. In other words if any war breaks out that cuts off their supplies they only have oil for 15-16 days!

Is there any source for this because so far I have only seen statements by random people claiming the decision makers should start banning bitcoin not that it is already banned.

Wrong. You can not avoid sanctions by using bitcoin because the source and destination are still known. The only reason why countries use bitcoin for their international trade is to replace US dollar which is an attack on US economy considering it will get completely destroyed if the world stopped using dollar.

BTW this is not new and there is a topic about it here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5412477.0

Conspiracy theories were invented by governments who wanted to silence whistleblowers and anybody who was criticizing their corrupted moves. Which is why they became popular.
For example a couple of years ago whenever anybody criticized the COVID19 vaccines they were branded as crazy conspiracy theorists and today the West is still struggling with the Pandemic and they have tens of thousands of new cases every day with hundreds of deaths in US alone.
The most recent one is the Energy Crisis in Europe which people called a "conspiracy theory" and now the crisis is showing its ugly head (eg. the de-industrialization of EU or the 2 hour blackout in London recently).

Majority of altcoins are scam projects specially among the top 10 coins that had gotten too pumped because of the centralized authorities behind them with deep pockets.

In any case this is not a new thing for people to see FUD in the media and negatively judge bitcoin. These days they see the energy FUD and call bitcoin "wasteful", some years ago (pre 2013) they saw all the Silk Road drama and called bitcoin "drug dealer money", and a lot more.
Seeing how centralized and scamy altcoins are or how risky centralized exchanges are and how they scam people is not new either. The media is also on the side of FUD which makes it very hard to counter it.

I'm not sure if this is hypothetical or you are confusing bitcoin with an altcoin like ethereum. But in the past 13 years we only had "high level of network congestion" for a couple of months in 2017 when there was the biggest spam attack on bitcoin network in history, some of which was funded by centralized altcoins like DASH.

Every single bitcoin script IS a smart contract! Only certain functionalities that a "currency" does not really need are not available in bitcoin scripts.

I disagree because none of those platforms have any adoption whatsoever except gamblers (who invest in tokens hoping profit) and scammers (who create tokens to empty other people's pockets). They have shown no real world applications so far.

Such big decisions don't change based on which political party controls congress or the government. In US they have always been pretty much in complete agreement when it comes to warmongering with only slight differences in the tactics they use. In other words US will continue fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian despite who controls congress/whitehouse.

I also disagree with Russia continuing its attack on other countries. There is no evidence of that so far. In fact the more possible scenario is an internal war between different European countries specially in the Eastern Europe and the Balkans. Basically the West would attack any EU member that wishes to normalize relations with Russia. That is what Poland's purpose is and why they are being armed and exactly why they warned Germany against normalization (bringing up WWII, etc.).

The 2023 will be mostly unpredictable though... That I agree with.

Those are not the only two options! Bitcoin may never rise up again and still continue staying strong and provide its unique utility to the entire world as the only decentralized payment system.

Nobody really cares what Elon says about bitcoin ever since he started his FUD campaign a long time ago.

You should educate yourself about what bitcoin is and stop seeing it as a profit machine!

Nobody doubts that bitcoin price will start rising in the near future but as I said Elon Musk lost all credibility when he showed his true colors. He is just a big troll and I go as far as calling him a scammer who attempted market manipulation which worked for Doge and only once to a little degree about bitcoin. His subsequent attempts failed miserably though and now he is trying to regain that attention again hoping people have forgotten his FUD campaign and market manipulation...

You are right. The way to analyze this current global situation is to look at it as a conflict between two blocs in the world the East and the West not just two countries. In other words this is not so much about Russia "not being a stupid country" or "learning from past" but mostly about the Eastern Bloc working better than the Western Bloc as an alliance; not to mention that the majority of resources are in the East so there is already an upper hand in the East.

* In the Eastern bloc when they sanctioned Russia they just replaced those who left their economy with someone else (most of it anyways). For example their gas and oil went to India, China, Pakistan, etc. and even used Iranian channels that were built in the past 4 decades to circumvent sanctions.
* But in the Western bloc they are working against each other. For example US keeps printing more money and exports its resulting inflation to its allies in EU crashing their economy while absorbing part of the capital that leaves EU speeding up the de-industrialization of EU. That is while they also sell EU LNG and oil at an extremely high price (while Russia sells it in Eastern bloc at a discount!). As you said "Europe is sandwiched in this strategy".
The situation inside the European Union isn't good either. Stronger countries like UK and France and "squeezing" weaker countries like Italy, Greece and Balkans for their own survival.

Electrum is a stand alone desktop application that has nothing to do with your web browser, meaning any settings in your browser is not going to affect Electrum in any way.

The problem is not with desktop wallets, the problem is with your environment. For example if you are using windows and connect to the internet with it, there is a good chance that it gets infected with some sort of malware/keylogger and when you use a bitcoin wallet you can lose your funds (among other risks).

This is why the term "hot wallet" exists. The solution is to use "cold storage" and only use your hot wallet for small amounts.
Cold storage is basically an air-gap system that has never been connected to the outside world (through the internet or otherwise) and never will connect. You can use a dedicated system (like an old laptop) or use a secondary OS (even live Linux).
Another way is to buy a hardware wallet and make things simple on yourself.

https://electrum.readthedocs.io/en/latest/coldstorage.html

Different price in different sources (including exchanges not just price reporting websites) depends on a lot of factors in addition to what others said.
For example sometimes the coin you are looking at is dead (has no blockchain) so nobody can transfer that coin between exchanges and the price difference can not be used as Arbitrage so it remains different. Sometimes one exchange's wallet is dead (maintenance, etc.) that prevents deposits of that shitcoin and nobody has it to dump so the price could go higher or remain higher while it dumps elsewhere hence creating a difference.

This type of spam like any other type of spam requires paying a lot of fee in total specially since it also increases the fee so for example if they start at 1 sat/vb they will increase it to 100 sat/vb while their older transactions with low fee would be dropped out of mempool.
With 0.5BTC you can only create about roughly 100k transactions not a million.

It is way too soon to talk about defeat since this war is going to drag on for a long time.

Right now the Russian strategy is to stand back (after they captured strategic positions over the past couple of months) and slowly destroy Ukraine's infrastructure hoping they can break their forces while they shell any progressing forces to get high casualties. Unless Ukraine can break this strategy and push Russians back in the coming weeks, their chances of sustained resistance decreases significantly over time.
This is the least of what we are going to see all through winter.

As for oil prices, regardless of the result of this conflict there are a lot of other factors affecting that. For one the Russian oil has to come back to European markets at large to bring the price down and considering sanctions and the relationship with the West, I don't see that happening.
2 other important factors are China and whether they are going to be pulled into a war with Taiwan (or maybe even Japan!!) that could significantly decrease demand and bring the price down (here).
And whether the oil producing countries like Saudis are going to be allowed to increase production. As we speak the tensions between Yemen and Saudis is growing and over the past month multiple tankers stealing Yemenis oil were hit. Next target could be their oil infrastructure (the only thing preventing it so far has been FIFA World Cup in Qatar).

P.S. I disagree with the last sentence. US is actually too desperate to bring energy price down. This has been their strategy ever since they invented "Petrodollar" they first increased the oil price to force other countries to buy the massive amount of fiat they had printed (like during Pandemic) to buy the extra expensive oil. Then they ordered their colonies like Saudis to increase production and decrease price so that the high energy price doesn't move US economy into a recession+inflation combo.
This time they could not do that and US is experiencing both. FED has already increased interest rates multiple times and I believe right now it is somewhere close to 5% which means it has also lost its effectiveness in controlling inflation...

Technically this is not an additional risk because it is the same with a single key wallets (single seed) if you lose that one seed you lose your wallet also. The assumption here is that each key is kept safely and with proper backups.
The alternative would be 2-of-3 with the third key stored with a third party (eg. a bank safety deposit box) so that it can be recovered if any of the 2 keys were lost.

Things have actually gotten both better an worse
Obviously technology has helped increase the efficiency and reduce waste so now we are seeing more yields and better products which is the good part. But at the same time a large part of the agriculture industry specially in the West has been genetically manipulating crops to increase production and efficiency that has led to reduced product quality that can even cause cancer! Which is the bad part.

What people intentionally ignore when talking about Russian oil/gas sales is the amount of money they've already earned this past 9 months from their sales which was way beyond their wildest imaginations and beyond what they could have earned if they never invaded Ukraine. In simple terms even if Russian energy export falls to zero today, they still make profit!
This is due to the fact that energy prices soared to the moon and the fact that Europe has been strengthening Russian Ruble preventing it from falling.