LN transactions are secure and when you are using LN you are still using bitcoin which is decentralized, cheap and secure. It also doesn't have the limitations of fiat such as the need for a middle man (eg banks) to transfer your money and since cost is based on byte size not amount value the cost is going to be a lot less specially for larger amounts. You also have a much higher privacy compared to using centralized fiat.

Sometimes that is true, like these days that the bitcoin market is "calm". Other times it is not possible to predict, for example when the price is making sudden moves. Or even in some cases major altcoin pump and dumps require bitcoin moving to and from altcoin exchanges creating a lot of spikes that can not be predicted.

I couldn't agree more. That is why visual representation of mempool such as https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/ are always the best for fee estimation. You can see the mempool size, the fluctuations and in times of fee growth you can even estimate the rate at which fee is rising.

That is the "human behavior" that we cannot predict not the time between blocks. Even if blocks were mined at fixed intervals (like every 60 seconds) we still wouldn't have been able to predict whether in the next seconds there will be a surge of new transactions paying higher fees or not.

Fee estimators should work on size not count and shouldn't try to predict the future.
Basically they should tell you that with current mempool situation when the next block is mined it will clear ~4MB from mempool and will contain down to x sat/vbyte fee and anything lower will remain unconfirmed. That way it won't matter if someone was paying very high fees for 100 transactions.

There is a reason Lightning Network is referred to as second layer instead of stand-alone network. It relies on "first layer" that is the on-chain transactions and not only LN will always rely on first layer but also it will create more on-chain transactions as it is used more since the coins in a LN channel come from on-chain transactions and those channels need to be settled on chain at some point.

Are you running a LN node yourself? Which implementation? (out of curiosity).

It seems like giving away paper wallets is a popular method, I too have done it in the past with small amounts to those very close to me.

However I always believe that the best way to introduce bitcoin to others is to help them understand what bitcoin is and help fix the misconceptions they have about bitcoin. This too is what I have been trying to do. Basically letting them know that bitcoin is a currency not a get rich quick scheme. For example I used to talk about bitcoin price but for a couple of years now I always avoid mentioning the price.
Having some small technical understanding of how bitcoin works helps a lot too. They are usually confused about mining or how they should store bitcoin, you'd be surprised to see how many think they should store it with some third party like they do with PayPal for example!

In a normal key pair the private key is 256 bits and is selected in the correct secp256k1 range randomly so it is impossible to find it from the public key due to the massive search size that would take millions of years to search even when you share the work among all computing power in the world.

In a puzzle on the other hand the private keys are small from 1 bit to tens of bits and are meant to be searched and found in a short time. Faster if you share it among more people.

All economies were affected by the pandemic and I don't think there is any government that didn't print a lot of money during this time. The only difference is that some governments like in US went nuts and printed an absurd amount of money and that is affecting their economy in a big negative way not the pandemic.
I agree that Chinese economy will not suffer as much but I believe it is because interestingly China suffered a lot less from the pandemic compared to other countries, even though it mainly started there.

I don't know about genius but he is definitely controversial. He is not even taken that seriously in academia because his works are all filled with a lot of controversy. He is being "paid" by selling those books by the way.
He is also very wrong on a regular basis. For example in 2010 he was predicting with absolute certainty that hyperinflation is coming and was calling everyone to short the market!

The fact is that you can't explain everything with math and coming up with a equation doesn't mean anything specially when the conclusion is made first then some technobabble is created to justify that conclusion.

If we draw a Venn diagram of all the people who are willing to buy Tesla cars (that cause more global warming than anything else to be charged), and all the people who own bitcoin and all the people who are willing to spend a large amount of bitcoin we can see that the intersection of the 3 circles is a handful of people who may not even bother buying such an expensive car.
This has to tell us a lot about one of the main reasons why Tesla stopped accepting bitcoin payments!

Also when you look at Musk's tweets and how he was desperately investing in Doge coin and were trying to pump and dump it you get the other main reason why Tesla stopped accepting bitcoin payments!

That's true but remember that they have to do it only once. You don't download the entire blockchain every time you run your full node!
Think of it as installing a new operating system. It takes a lot of time to format your disks, re-partition them, install the OS, update it, install all your software and maybe update those too. If it is not your first time and your internet speed, your hard disk, etc. are slow then it could easily take a full day to do all these. BUT you only do it once, every future time you start your computer the operating system starts from where you left off.

Initial Block Download is the same. You do it once then each time you restart your node it starts from where you left off and the amount of data your node has to process is much less.

No he doesn't. Just because once his FUD was in the same direction that bitcoin was going that doesn't mean he has a "great role"! He is just another A.hole on the internet spreading FUD about bitcoin.

Nobody cared about it when they started accepting bitcoin and since nobody ever paid with bitcoin for their cars they removed it and claimed it is because "energy consumption". If they start accepting bitcoin, again nobody would care and nothing will change about bitcoin apart from a couple of days of people talking about it on the internet before forgetting it again.

That's because for some reason that I can't understand you think Musk is important for bitcoin!!!

There is no more room left for drops. There has already been a MASSIVE 50% drop and the only direction left to go is up. The moment $40k is broken price will shoot up to $70k.

Just because some poorly written applications in the past by incompetent developers used a weak RNG doesn't mean random number generators are weak in general! You just have to know how to use them correctly. Giving them up altogether and relying on a weak method sounds like replacing one mistake with another.

Hardware wallets are mostly good for those people who are looking for convenience and want to have a good security because they either can't or don't have the time to learn how to do things on their own. Otherwise I don't think there is any threshold for how much bitcoin you own before you buy one of these hardware wallets.

I think the problem is that what you want (a vanity bitcoin address) and the method you want to use (SHA256(string+n)) don't make sense together and that is what people are trying to tell you. Mainly it doesn't make any sense to start from a starting seed to generate the vanity address, if you want such an address then simply start from a random key.

You said something about forgetting and being able to recover it from that seed which again doesn't make sense if you are generating a vanity address because depending on how many fixed starting characters the address has the process can take a very long time and recovering it this way is not practical. Not to mention that using a starting string that you can remember suggests weakness in the randomness.

Here is a suggestion, why not generate a random entropy then start your vanity address search from there until you find the key that corresponds to your desired address. Then take the private key to that address (256-bit) and encode that using an algorithm like BIP39 to a set of words that you can easily store or remember (although it is not recommended to only rely on your memory for backup).

There is a difference between "following" and "being affected by".
For example does bitcoin price "follow" Elon Musk tweets or is it "affected by them"? Then there the matter of to what extent.

Bitcoin price never followed its hashrate and there is no reason to do it either. The hashrate on the other hand follows price which is the only logical direction.

However when we have a lot of FUD talking about some doomsday scenario just because a small portion of the hashrate went offline in China and another small portion of hashrate shut down elsewhere because of the 50% drop in price then there is the "being affected by" part I mentioned above.
In this case the FUD already ran rampant for 2 months and caused all the drops it could, I don't think there is any more room left for more panic selling. In fact I believe in a couple of days we will start seeing the end of FUD campaign and the start of rising back up.

Mathematically that is dividing by 2 and rounded down to get rid of the decimals.

Nitpicking
Since CAmount type is int64_t (signed) the >> operation is not a simple shift right (SHR) it is instead a right shift then a most significant bit flip (SAR). But since the initial amount (and all subsequent ones) is smaller than 0x7FFFFFFFFFFFFFFF (MSB is always 0) the result of SHR (logical shift right) and SAR (arithmetic shift right) are the same but your code is still taking both steps.

Correction: Vitalik wrote something to play with words and justify the centralization of his own shitcoin called Ethereum which is very much centralized.

Or better said, bitcoin's network security has grown tremendously.

Nodes could never "obtain block rewards" the "work" that the hardware performed did. And the way Proof of Work is designed is increasing the required work with the number of users (adoption) hence it requires more specialized hardware.

Misleading.
Core developers are a handful of people, contributors are a lot more. Any contributor can propose a change to bitcoin protocol not just the core devs.

This is misleading too.
What happens is that any change from anyone first has to be proposed publicly and will be discussed among those with technical understanding of how Bitcoin works. Then if the proposal is deemed worthy it would be implemented as code and then the testing starts to find any possible problems with the code or improve it. Again this happen publicly and anyone can contribute.
Finally after enough time has passed and the proposal is well tested and accepted by "experts" it will be merged into reference implementation for the public to approve which includes miners voting and node owners upgrading their software to show their support.

Suffice it to say that any proposal can fail in any of the above steps if it is not accepted.

The "user" who has only bought some bitcoins hoping to make some profit and doesn't even understand how the protocol works doesn't get to participate in any of the steps including development or signalling.

There is no relationship between these 3 statements that you posted one after the other.
- A major miner is just an ordinary miner who were willing to take a much bigger risk and make a much bigger investment. It is only fair for those taking bigger risk to have more hashrate.
- We can not have blocks with infinite capacity, there will have to be a cap and as long as there is a cap there will be a fee market and competition over that space.
- Decentralization of bitcoin has nothing to do with any of that.

There is a big difference between "cryptocurrency" in general and "bitcoin.
Bitcoin is innovative and has a bright future simply because it is useful and is delivering what it is supposed to (a decentralized censorship resistant currency) but majority of cryptocurrencies aka altcoins are completely useless and are created to be pumped and dumped.
So you can't just say that just because bitcoin is successful that means "crypto" is going to be successful also. It doesn't work like that.

Is there any proof of this I can study. For example what were the transactions they rejected why and who picked them up?

It won't just be the "price consequences" for their business, if majority of hashrate try to maliciously attack bitcoin (which censoring transactions is an example) either bitcoin dies or the community takes drastic measures such as a hard fork to brick their ASICs overnight.

Actually bitcoin is the ONLY thing that humans can control. The only difference is that the "control" is not on one person or one organization but the power to control is spread among all bitcoin users. Whenever you run a full node to enforce the consensus rules or own hashrate to vote for changing them, you have part of that control.

There is no such thing as "quadratic elliptic curve encryption" or encryption in general in Bitcoin protocol.

The protocol is actually complicated.

You seem to believe that "control" equals "hacking" and not being able to crack bitcoin means people have no control. But that is not the definition of "control" which you keep repeating.