What sort of stuff? If you want to build services, you should learn Web Technologies, Security, Database Management Systems, Software Engineering. If you are thinking about building protocols, like for example contributing to the development of Lightning Network, then you can pick Distributed Systems and Cryptography.

If a transaction is invalid, it won't even reach mining nodes, unless you broadcast it directly to them. The nodes don't waste their bandwidth on broadcasting invalid transactions, that would be vulnerable to DDOS.

Also, what you are talking about "banning transactions" is a different concept - nodes can censor valid transactions by refusing to include them, but you need to execute 51% attack to succeed at it, otherwise you'll just delay the confirmation by a block or two at best.

This isn't Bitcoin's fault, there's absolutely no need to pay such high amounts for network fees, and exchanges actually don't do that, they keep the difference between their withdrawal fee and actual network fee for themselves. In 2016 withdrawal fees used to be lower, but then they skyrocketed in the end of 2017 during the heights of the bubble, and after that exchanges "forgot" to lower their fees, since they probably noticed that people pay it anyway. They also incentivize people to keep their coins on exchange, so they would be more likely to trade and thus pay their trading fees and make profit for them.

Altcoins are not here to stay, hundreds of altcoins have already died, hundreds have lost almost all their value, and thousands more are just waiting for it to happen. Yes, the phenomenon of altcoins will exist for a long time, but individual coins will not, and this makes investing in alts extremely risky. Risk in itself is always a part of investment, so we should ask if there's enough reward to justify the risk? I believe the answer is no, it's not 2017 anymore, very few altcoins will moon, so the average expected value of altcoin investments likely to be negative (at least relative to Bitcoin).

I was looking at the charts recently and noticed some interesting trends. In 2017, altcoins tended to outperform Bitcoin will still following it - so at that time they had a reputation of levereged Bitcoin investment, since they also tended to fall harder if Bitcoin falls. But today we see a different picture - while Bitcoin grows, alts fail to grow at the same rate, and they still fall hard when Bitcoin goes down. This means that alts have increased risk and reduced reward when compared to Bitcoin, and having high risk and low reward is very bad for any investment.

Funny thing is, Dow Jones has already recovered from that 500 point dip and it's even higher than it was before it, even though it went a little bit down just recently. Just google Dow Jones and see for yourself, Google provides very convenient charts right on their page.

I think it shows that the markets don't move like amateur traders often predict, just because it sounds logical (event X causes price to move up/down because reasons) it doesn't mean that it's correct. Professional analysts don't think "oh shit this coronavirus thing will crash the markets", they do research about the possible impact of such event, they select some assumptions, they do some heavy calculations, they might consult with some specialists, like biologists in this case, and only then they draw conclusions.

Of course some shitcoins will outperform Bitcoin, but this fact is useless, because no one knows exactly which shitcoins would do so, and combined with another fact that the rest of shitcoins won't be doing so well - either they'll go down or just have underwhelming gains, it's objectively better to invest in Bitcoin which has higher returns and lower risks. Think about it, if Bitcoin goes down, shitcoins will go down even faster, it's always like that, but when Bitcoin goes up, it's not guaranteed that shitcoins will go up too.

Why are you calling Bitcoin "semi-decentralized"? It's pretty much the most decentralized cryptocurrency out there thanks to its node count, hashpower and global community. The ecosystem of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency exchanges is centralized, but it's not caused by any of the Bitcoin's properties, so it's wrong to say that altcoins are the future. And privacy has little to do with decentralization, they are different topics, and usually decentralization is needed to achieve privacy - not the opposite.

Ethereum is concerned with "transaction finality" because they want to switch to PoS, and in PoS 51% attacks are more dangerous because of the "nothing at stake" problem, which is why they try to invent some countermeasures to deal with this problem. Bitcoin is a PoW currency, so you don't have to worry about it as long as the hashrate remains big enough, and currently it's really big and keeps growing.

Another 500 million in under two years? That would require 4.75k transactions per block, and the current record is 2700, which is close to the limit. So, there's no way we would reach 1 billion transactions in that time, there's simply no capacity, and there would definitely be no blocksize increases anytime soon. You can't just extrapolate the chart without thinking if its possible to maintain that rate further.

It sounds like you think that mempool is some sort of a single centralized database that exists independently from full nodes. This is wrong, because in fact there's no single mempool, every full node maintains their own mempool. This is why when a transaction gets stuck for long, you can notice that it sometimes it disappears from blockchain explorers, but can be available on other explorers. This is because some nodes choose to delete it, while others still keep it.

All decentralized algorithms are vulnerable to 51% attacks, so you can kinda ignore it. The only networks that are not vulnerable to it are the centralized ones like XRP or Libra. The key difference between PoW and all other algorithms is that in PoW energy is spent on every block, so it's much harder to succesfully launch a 51% attack, because you not only need hardware, but also you have to keep sustaining your attack, which is extremely costly. With PoS you can just buy majority of coins and wreak havoc with nothing to stop you.

Where are you getting your info from, Bitcoin.com? Lightning IS Bitcoin, it uses unbroadcasted real on-chain transaction - it's not some IOU or a token like trolls say. And it doesn't have any big problems with centralization, it's again just FUD aimed at technically uneducated people. It's nearly as user-friendly as Bitcoin itself, there are many wallets with nice interface. And why do you say that it's costly to maintain a channel? You just open it once with an on-chain transaction (which are dirt cheap as of now), and it can stay open for years without any additional costs, transaction fees are tiny in Lightning, and you can refill your balance with Lightning transactions when you run out of money.

What does "getting women into blockchain technology" even mean? Do you want more female blockchain developers? Well, then how would you get them if there's not much female programmers to begin with? Or maybe you want women to invest in shitcoins? Trading is also a male-dominated field, although not as much as software engineering. But in both cases as well as in many others, women usually avoid taking risks, so it's reasonable that there's less women in blockchain. And refusing to take risks shouldn't be viewed as a bad thing, so imo there's no problem that needs solving.

Mining farms don't have that many employees, so they wouldn't be affected by some restrictions that might be installed by the Chinese government. Also, I remember watching a documentary about miners and it showed how the works basically live on the site - I don't know if its the case for many/all farms, but still it's a possibility, and with the bullish market the owners can offer a good pay to make their workers stay inside for days and weeks.

I never met a person in my life that owns a smartwatch. The market share of smartwatches compared to smartphones and tablets must be minuscule. And people who own a smatwatch most likely own a smartphone too, so it shouldn't be a problem for them to have a Bitcoin wallet with them. I never used a smartwatch, but I'm pretty sure it's more convenient to do Bitcoin transactions from a bigger screen of a smartphone.

So, to answer your question, it doesn't seem to be very practical or relevant to the userbase, and as others pointed out, it's likely insecure.

Bitcoin is the leader of cryptocurrency market - it has always been and still is, with no signs of it losing its positions, in fact it only grew stronger in the recent years and has more dominance than in the previous bull period. Hence, it's irrelevant what happens to altcoins aka shitcoins, even if they are from top 5 - they don't influence the whole market, and none of them can influence Bitcoin. There's only a relationship between related coins, like ETH and its competitotrs, but even that doesn't always mean there's a predictable reaction when it comes to price.

Well, you can't have a free market and no corporation/financial institutions at the same time. Like, shortly after Bitcoin itself was created, centralized exchanges started emerging and now they hold a significant portion of supply and serve as gateway for many users. And we can't do anything about it on a protocol level, our best bet is to preach to newcomers and casuals how bad centralized companies are and that they should use decentralized alternatives.

Bitcoin doesn't have an autoupdate feature like many of the other (especially centralized) software do - so for starters, if devs will go rogue and release a malicious version, the community will simply not accept it. Bitcoin users generally don't rush to upgrade their nodes asap, it's a pretty long process. And even if someone gets careless and updates their node without reviewing the code, they can always downgrade it. This is why decentralization of nodes is important - nodes are the most powerful entity in Bitcoin, both miners and developers don't have full control over Bitcoin.

Warren Buffet is so insignificant to Bitcoin, he's not a cryptographer, he's not a computer scientist, he's a boomer with zero understanding of new technologies - can't even use a smartphone or email. So why do so many Bitcoiners care about his opinions? Because average Bitcoiners only view Bitcoin as an investment, but this is wrong because even if you only want to see profits, you still have to learn the technology so you can make educated decisions about its future. This is why Warren Buffet's "rat poison" opinion is worthless, despite his legendary reputation as a trader.