Vulnerability in protocol is a very different thing than "locking other people's coins". Lets take OP codes that were disabled/removed from protocol. They had vulnerabilities and if anyone had any coins locked by an OP code like OP_CAT their coins would have been locked because such output can not be spent.
Or for example if you had any coins that were locked with a script like the following (pubkey script) they are unspendable now that BIP-147 is active because "majority decided".

You see in bitcoin the majority has been making this kind of decisions for a very long time and it won't be any different for ECC in the far away future either.

It is worth mentioning that zero is an invalid bitcoin private key because it is outside the allowed private key range ([0,N)). But one is a perfectly valid private key and it is a bug in the library to reject it as invalid with an exception.

That's an entirely different situation. Ethereum forked to roll back blocks so that they can get their money back that was lost in a buggy smart contract which didn't get fixed either (If they had fixed the bugs of their protocol then it would at least make a little sense!).

In any ways, I have argued before that if there is a vulnerability it should be removed instead of us letting it exist and hope nobody uses it. In this case if ECC were broken it must be removed completely which would effectively lock any coin that is not moved to new algorithm before a certain deadline.

No you don't "need to" buy bitcoin!

Short answer: whenever you have some extra money laying around.

It depend on whether you are buying bitcoin with a long term view or you are just day trading for short term profits.
If it is the former then you shouldn't concern yourself with "dips" that much even though it is preferable to do. The problem is that you may keep waiting for a >30% dip while price keeps going up so you end up not buying at for example $3200 while you watch the price reach $7000 then decide to buy!

If it is the later then you want to always wait for the best entry point because you would also exit soon after (to get the profit out as a day trader). But that requires a lot of market analysis and the size of the dip depends on market situation, it is not going to be a fixed number.

Normally you don't buy altcoins with money, you buy them with bitcoin and also normally when you want to dump them and get out you convert them back to bitcoin directly.
This way you avoid additional exchange or even withdrawal fees.

We don't celebrate Thanksgiving but in gatherings the topic of cryptocurrencies has come up although they don't like it when I call out their shitcoins specially since they know next time I see them I would count their losses

More like the ongoing scam/hype.

There is nothing stopping them from sending a request to that merchant asking them to accept bitcoin. For example about 5 years ago people bombarded Valve with requests to accept bitcoin payment and they did it when they saw the demand.

As for your paradox, I used to see it that way too but no more. I believe it is a natural process that will happen slowly. When there is demand both sides will adopt bitcoin.
But the real issue is the price. When we see price keeps going up month after month or year after year, we end up with people who have bought bitcoin as an "investment" not as a currency so they are not willing to spend it in first place so there isn't really that much "demand" for merchants to accept it. Although I should add that even with this situation we are getting adoption in both camps: investors and spenders.

I honestly haven't seen any change in the altcoin market so far. Things are exactly the same.

* Majority of altcoins most of the times are dumping each time bitcoin goes either up or down.
* They have good pumping times when bitcoin price is stable.
* At any time a handful of altcoins are being pumped regardless of what bitcoin is doing. Then they get dumped after some time depending on the altcoin.

The altcoin market has been exactly like this ever since 2014 that I entered this world.

A paper wallet is whatever you want it to be, you are not forced to print a single private key (WIF) on paper, you can simply generate a mnemonic and write that down on a piece of paper which makes it your HD-paper-wallet so you can generate as many keys as you want.

The base58 string of an extended key contains a checksum so you can't just change characters because it would invalidate the existing checksum. You could decode it first using a base58 decoder, remove the checksum then change the first 4 bytes to get zprv and then encode it again with base58.

There is a chat room for the project on gitter you could use to ask others more familiar with the library: https://gitter.im/MetacoSA/NBitcoin

No it is not.

You forgot that we aren't talking about some abandoned coins in a P2PK output. We are also talking about a much bigger amount of bitcoin (in total) in reused addresses, like a lot of the addresses in the bitcoin rich-list.
The decision also won't be unilateral, whatever the decision may be. It will be a fork that like any other fork requires support from the majority.

They can but they don't.
Most early adopters aren't participating in the market, they own bitcoin either through mining or having bought it and are either holding it or using it (getting paid or paying others) as a currency. That doesn't affect the market in any ways.

Your observation about the article is correct though. The view of the author is a naive one that I believe mainly comes from looking at useless tokens and altcoins that are created to only be pumped and dumped. If you look at other posts by the author they are always talking about doomsday of financial markets with similar naive interpretations. The author also seems to have a great love for possible central bank issued shitcoin which tells you a lot about their views.

No, the first method is a reversible method (like PayPal) and lots of merchants receiving payment through reversible methods are getting scammed every day.
You can search the keyword "PayPal chargeback scam" and see the complaints.

Fixed the typo.

Not really. They are just providing a payment processing and a wallet service, they do minimum checks but they can't prevent someone from going through all those checks and still scam a merchant. If they could there wouldn't have been so many scams happening!

The problem isn't with the statement you quoted, otherwise there are bubbles of different sizes in bitcoin that burst from time to time. We had multiple small bubbles during 2016, 2017, 2019, 2020 and 2021 that burst and we had 2 big bubbles in 2018 and 2014 that burst.

The problem is that some people tend to call everything a "bubble" without even knowing what a bubble means. For example price goes from $1000 to $2000 and they start calling it a bubble just because $2000 is bigger than $1000!!!

The other problem is that some people have very narrow views. They have read a single article about a single bubble (eg. the one in 2017) and now think  that every bubble burst has to be the same size meaning a >80% dump!
The reality is that such a huge drop market crash only happens when there is a huge bubble. As I said earlier there are different bubble sizes, a small bubble can not be followed by a massive market crash. For example I have said many times in the past 2 years that if we are to see another 80% crash we first have to see a massive rise to a price like $400k+ otherwise if the rise and the subsequent bubble is small we can no longer expect such a huge crash.

Yeah the new virus affects bitcoin nodes and the symptoms includes slow transaction processing and propagation, cough where the node throws up 100 satoshi each time and finally in extreme cases death where the node sends all its balance to an OP_RETURN output.

Majority of those who get involved in altcoin trading lose a large amount of bitcoin specially since they all hang around too long. For example during 2017 we had a large surge of newcomers who bought a lot of different altcoins because they saw them pumping every day. But they didn't know that it was a "pump" and though it is "growth" so they ended up bag holding until they all lost a lot of money and some lost as much as 98% of their initial investment (left with only 2% of it).
If you want to see them, just search for topics talking about "having patience" during 2018

Are you by any chance manually creating a string with "curly braces", "commas", etc. in it?

If yes, this was your mistake. When you want to create a JSON object it is always best to create a JSON object not a string by hand. There should be libraries for it in all languages. For example you define tx then set its value to a hexadecimal string. In the end you use the ToString or ConvertToString method on that object to convert it to a string and use that result to send to the server.

Electrum "servers" are themselves full nodes, they receive your messages, parse the JSON and act accordingly.

I can't find any indication of changing the first 4 bytes (version bytes) in ExtKey.cs whether during construction of the object or setting the derivation path or deriving the keys. Which is probably why you always get the default version (producing xprv/xpub) when you convert the ExtKey object to string.
I also couldn't find any way to change this.

Base58Type enum doesn't seem to have the type to fetch the version either.

P.S. I'm not familiar with this library and it is not the most readable code so you may want to spend more time yourself investigating how it works.

Why would you need such a huge amount of RAM? A couple of hundred bytes is more than enough for all the cases you mentioned here. You also seem to be using the open source work provided by others and those projects don't take up that much memory either.

Basically for at least 7 years they have been using the same scare tactics to manipulate the market so that the weak hands panic sell their coins. The problem is that the country the used to use for their FUD was China and Chinese government screwed these FUDsters by shutting down all exchanges and mining in their country so now they have to find a new "scarecrow".

They are trying to come up with different countries, they tried US and that didn't work as much as they liked, same with multiple European countries. They are now trying India and I assure you in a very short time you will see them use Russia too. This FUD is already old and obsolete. They need to come up with a new one trying to scare people with "bloodbath"

It is more precise to say that the FUD ended and the panic sellers ran out of bitcoins to sell so the fake sell pressure that is slowly going away is letting the natural upward movement to resume once again. Unfortunately due to existence of day traders it would take some time to go back to normal and resume the rally but it will happen.