Sure, but the degree of such effects is very different. For example US economy tanking took Europe down with it too, so the effects were huge. But when I talk about indirect effects I have 2008 in mind when US was recording negative economy growth with stock market crashing and millions of jobs being lost, etc., meanwhile Iran was setting +5.2% growth and that's a country that heavily relies on oil exports where the price dropped 70% from $150 to $40, with stock market soaring (after a short period of panic sell) and an increased non-oil exports.

Of course I believe that such things (in addition to how entangled their economy is to US economy) partially depends on the strength of the economy of the countries too. For example US has a massive economy but it is a very fragile economy. We saw this in 2008 recession and we saw this again in 2020 pandemic. Conversely Iran has a small economy but it is battle hardened. Take the past 4 years for example, nearly 2000¹ globally enforced sanctions only caused a high inflation for about 6 to 9 months before things went back to normal with regular inflation. Interestingly enough the pandemic effects on Iran economy were minimal too.

¹ Just to let you know how ridiculously high that number is, the next sanctioned country is Syria and there is only about 500 sanctions and it is falling apart! For another ridiculous comparison, Iraq had about 10 sanctions starting in 90's and a million people started to starve to death annually and Iraq economy basically ceased to exist. (Stats are from Peterson Institute for International Economics)

It depends on whether the parties are corrupt/incompetent or if the whole system is deeply corrupted.
If it is the former then I strongly disagree, it makes a big difference who is in the office. A more competent administration without the same corrupt actors in its body could easily make big changes.
But if it is the later then maybe it is time that the system was replaced in its entirety!

To be honest I haven't even seen any altcoins that could be mined with a mobile phone either. There has been a bunch of them that claimed to be able to do that and some applications were released but those that I have seen were all scams that sometimes infected the device.

When you weren't looking we scaled bitcoin twice this year and nearly 5 years ago!

Wrong.
LN provides a very fast way of making virtually unlimited number of transactions in a secure and decentralized way, with the cherry of increased privacy on top.
Whether it costs 1 cent to open a channel or not is not changing that.

This is a vague statement. What conflict of what interests? And what do YOU consider "best for bitcoin users" and what is this "centralization" you mention here?

Sorry, I'm not going to read the link but it's a free world feel free to start a network without a blockchain (ie. LN without bitcoin) and introduce it as a solution and see if people use it or not.
I personally would love to see an innovation...

Regardless of the audience, claiming that paper wallets are obsolete is pretty misleading. In fact it is more misleading if the audience is at beginners level or doesn't understand much. They should be educated on why and when a paper wallet is insecure or doesn't provide the functionality that you would want (single private key compared to HD wallets). And more importantly they should be told about what they can do to improve that.

These numbers don't look correct.
With 8 missing characters it should take less than 4 days (1/4 the reported runtime) to check all permutations.

I wouldn't tell anyone to stop using any type of wallets, just as long as they understand what are the advantages and disadvantages of each wallet type (that could include even custodial wallets). For example a paper wallet generated on a website is never secure or a hardware wallet that can be exploited can lead to losses. So you can never that one method is better than the other IMO.

When comparing hardware wallets with paper wallets I would consider two facts.
1) If the user is new and doesn't want to or can not spend time learning and creating a secure wallet, the hardware wallet for them is a good option. They just have to pay some money to buy them.
2) If the user is going to regularly access the wallet, using hardware wallet is more convenient than using a paper wallet. Also if paper wallet was chosen a HD one should be created instead of a single key.

Personally since I didn't like paying for my bitcoin wallet, I created my own cold storage using a USB disk and a Linux OS and Electrum with paper backups. I wouldn't call it outdated either.

I don't mean to jump to conclusions but these are usually signs of having a fake wallet file, specially since it contains a popular transaction the scammers use in these fake files.
You should make sure your friend has actually created this wallet himself and hasn't bought it.

How did you come up with the signed transaction you posted above?

Technically the output you are trying to spend doesn't have any address since it is a P2PK output. So you should check if the private key you get produces the same public key

Well, address is a human readable string created with a certain encoding and some additional bytes for version, etc using the hash of the public key (or hash of the script in case of P2SH or P2WSH). So if you have the RIPEMD160 hash of SHA256 hash of public key then you can directly use that hash to get the address string.
Although it is possible, as I said, it is not common practice.

Do you actually have the private key to the 340 bitcoins in that output from 11 years ago or are you trying to fake it?
If it is the later then don't waste your time or other's since it is not possible, if it were bitcoin wouldn't have lived past 2009.

If it is the former then you can use the bitcoin core's signrawtransactionwithkey command to sign the transaction you posted here with the actual private key (you probably should remove the signature from it first). You can do it offline without syncing bitcoin core (if you haven't synced already) then broadcast it through a block explorer or an SPV client like Electrum if privacy is not a concern.
Docs: https://bitcoincore.org/en/doc/0.21.0/rpc/rawtransactions/signrawtransactionwithkey/

Taproot is like both P2PKH/P2WPKH and P2SH/P2WSH combined into one output script. You can have a single private key and a single signature for a P2TR address or you can have a complex script that spends a P2TR output that may need multiple participants.

You can generate any address type by having the public key or the appropriate hash although it makes sense to do it with the public key which is what HD watch-only wallets do.

You can't (in most cases) and shouldn't ever "convert" an address to another type. If they do such a conversion for Taproot addresses you could end up losing your coins.
It is like a weird way of saying "we don't support the new address format".

Think of P2WSH as P2SH. There is a "script" that spends the output, it doesn't have to require 2 keys. It can be a single key using a locktime (OP_HODL) for example.
Also as I explained above you can have a simple "single-sig" address for your taproot address.

Did you get the initial error message (Signature is found in scriptCode) on this transaction? Because that makes no sense for that, however the second error message could be thrown for this tx if I'm not mistaken.

In any case this transaction is invalid simply because the signature you provided in it's signature script is invalid. So after evaluation, the OP_CHECKSIG would push false to the stack and the last step would require true to be the last item on the stack which it is not so it is rejected.

Interestingly enough this is a very common misconception. The fact is that NFTs are nothing more than just another useless token that in fact have nothing to do with "digital art, etc.". They are just selling these tokens with a promise that there is a link between them and whatever digital stuff you buy from them, usually it is a hash to create that link.

Now with that clarification you an clearly see that if that centralized server that stores the digital goods goes offline that NTF is not going to do anything for the owners since they no longer have their "goods"!
Another issues is that there is nothing stopping others who don't have the token to get the same goods! For example someone buys a so called "digital art" for a lot of money through an NFT and receives the "art" but also anyone else who has not spent a dime would also get the same "digital art"!

You should share the raw transaction you are broadcasting here because sometimes these error messages can happen for a couple of reasons.
The first error message seems to happen when your scriptCode contains a signature (a non-standard problem): https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/623745ca74cf3f54b474dac106f5802b7929503f/src/script/interpreter.cpp#L355
The second error I've seen happening for unrelated cases that has nothing to do with CHECK(MULTI)SIG.

We already did outperform VISA when we introduced the second layer solution called Lightning Network.

All the security, centralization, etc. are true but another big problem with these "options" (not solutions) is that they have no link to bitcoin and they have absolutely nothing to do with bitcoin. Just because with some market dynamics in some centralized exchanges you can dump one of these tokens for 1 bitcoin that doesn't mean they represent bitcoin. You may some day face a problem where 1 WBTC is equal to 0.1 BTC and there is nothing stopping that from happening.

In technical view you can say that a second layer like LN depends on bitcoin and what you have there is directly linked to bitcoin and its chain. If bitcoin stops working, LN dies with it too. But if bitcoin stops working WBTC will still stay alive and vice versa meaning when the token platform goes away or maybe they do another roll back WBTC will vanish while bitcoin still remains intact.

You can add 2 points (public keys) or subtract them but you can not multiply or divide two points.
You can multiply or divide a point with a number but you can't add or subtract an integer from a point.

Maybe if you explain what you want to achieve with these operations we can help you better.

Place the 0.043BTC with an escrow and open a new topic in the services board.

Your arguments are flawed specially since you want to end it with intrinsic value of bitcoin. The bitcoin value and what makes this network secure which will then ensure the immutability of the blockchain is the fact that bitcoin is a currency and is used for transfer of value.
Don't get me wrong it is good to mention other utilities that bitcoin with its immutable time-stamped database provides but you can't side-line the main utility that ensures other utilities.

This question and the arguments are irrelevant to the topic at hand. You are focusing too much on a very special use case in a very short duration of time whereas the topic of discussion is bitcoin scalability and how a centralized token on a centralized platform with many different risks has nothing to do with bitcoin scalability.
Otherwise you are right, there are altcoins that serve certain purposes for traders like Tether for example even though they are very risky.

Most of them aren't either pro or anti bitcoin. They are just media outlets that are desperate for any kind of attention so they write articles that go with the existing market mood. That means negative articles (ie. bitcoin is dead) during downtrends and positive articles (ie. bitcoin to the moon) during rises. That way they capitalize on traffic.

It is the first digit so it represents 0 but you may be thinking of the starting 1s like 1abc in which case it is replaced with a zero when decoding (or 1 is added for each starting zero) and we do it because in this encoding we convert an integer to the base58 and vice versa, it is important to know the number of zeros it had at the beginning or we may end up with a shorter invalid result.

Actually that is considered a high fee with these days standards. Most transactions are small (in virtual bytes not the amount they send) and the fees they pay are around 10 cents (1/10 of $1 fee).

Not exactly. The fees are more like icing on the cake for miners since they are already getting the block reward that is a significant amount of money for them. And for the foreseeable future they aren't going to need that much fees to cover the mining costs since the block reward is still high.

Besides profitability of mining mainly depends on costs and it is calculated with comparison to others and the entire hashrate. For example if you have access to cheaper electricity compared to others and your ASICs aren't old models, you'll make a bigger profit.

No because Proof of Stake is a fundamentally flawed protocol that only shitcoins use as a way to cheaply ensure their survival.