Majority of those who are buying shitcoins aren't doing it because they think bitcoin is "expensive", instead they are doing it because they "hope" the shitcoin they are buying is going to get pumped soon and it gives them a big profit.
In fact most of them are investing their "bitcoins" in these shitcoins in the hopes of increasing the amount of bitcoin they own. To put simply you may not be able to invest $1 million in bitcoin but you can invest $1000 and turn that into a million by trading, or hope to do so anyways!

It is normal for people on this forum to answer this way when the price is in a sideways action like the past week. Ask a similar question when price breaks $60k and reaches $70k in a week about if bitcoin is going to go to $200k in a month and they would answer yes!

Another normal thing each time bitcoin stabilizes or goes sideways, the shitcoin get pumped. It doesn't change anything about bitcoin's future rises though.

2017 is being repeated (to some extent) with a new scam called INCFOT. They just changed the name and some details about the token they create but the concept is still the same, create a useless token, link it to something semi interesting to get people to buy that garbage, make a huge profit!
People aren't blind, they see this scam and they want in if they can. Doesn't matter if they are celebrities or regular people. If they can make millions out of thin air they would jump at the opportunity. Talk about tulip mania!

About "decentralized trading"? Absolutely nothing.
About trading using "centralized tokens"? A lot of things.
For example they could also enforce the same restrictions on the other token including the token itself and the Ether tokens. They can also force the owners of the centralized token or the centralized platform (in this case the ethereum foundation) to freeze or reverse a transaction they deem "illegal" and they would have no choice but to obey.

Don't you mean public key?
I can't see any reason why the other party needs "private" key, partial or not. They only need the public key and then they can move from there by incrementing that point one G at a time until they find the correct public key that generates the desired address. Then all they have to do is to send back the number of times they added G to that point. User can simply add that value to their private key and get the new private key which corresponds to the public key of the vanity address.

I would be more worried about this part, when you say "miners" do you actually mean buying the real equipment (ASIC, GPUs, mining rigs,...) delivered to you where you install at home and then run to mine these coins or do you mean some website you have signed up with (aka a cloud mining) where you pay them some money and they promise you they have actual hashrate and are mining these coins?
Since you are mentioning a bunch of different altcoins with different algorithms and bitcoin it seems like it is the later in which case you may be getting scammed since cloud mining services are Ponzi schemes.

WBTC is as worse a solution as it gets because not only it is centralized but also it is created and relies upon a centralized and buggy platform.

Your solution also costs fee and possibly even more fees because there are 2 on-chain transactions and also a middle man (you?) in the middle of all this who would require additional commission for the service they provide.

A better solution, in my opinion, would be using Monero itself instead of a new altcoin that is not used for anything else and let anyone join that pool where they exchange bitcoin for XMR and can either hold XMR if they wanted to or exchange it back to bitcoin and get that new bitcoin out from bitcoin pool.
This is something that people already do but use swap services that is not a perfect solution because it is still centralized and the site they use could keep a record.

Paper wallet refers to the physical storage of private key(s) which means on a physical medium such as paper, plastic, wood, metal,... depending on the endurance you are looking for. For example for a very long term storage a metal plate would be ideal.
USBs are categorized as digital storage but they can be also categorized under cold storage as long as you never connect it to any computer that is not considered air-gaped. It is not as durable as physical storage though since digital mediums suffer from data loss if not connected to a power source.

Which one you choose depends on your goals, also remember that you don't have to only choose one. A paper wallet could be used for a long term storage (years) but a USB disk could be used to install an Electrum wallet for more frequent access while still being offline.

That requires a hard fork and a significant change in the database and chainstate which is harder than it sounds. There is no benefit in "balance base" bitcoin that I can think of either since it could be implemented using the way it is.

BTW "bc" is the fixed human readable part of SegWit addresses, "1" is the separator not the version, and the next letter after separator (in addresses) represents the version with "q" being first, "p" second, "z" third and so on.

If 2 things happen we won't see any big fee spikes any time soon even with price surges or even if we see another small hashrate drop.
1. (smaller effect) If multi-sig users start using Schnorr instead after activation of it.
2. (biggest effect) If we move the traffic from big bitcoin exchanges to lightning network. If you look at each big fee spike in history they are almost always happening because bitcoin price either goes up A LOT or drops A LOT. That means the extra on-chain transactions are from traders. If that is moved to LN the on-chain capacity is left for other transactions. Not to mention the ability to deposit/withdraw bitcoins in an instant with virtually no fee while being in full control of the keys instead of having to leave them on the exchanges.

Bitcoin design is based on outputs not addresses and balances so it is not possible to do this without significant changes to the protocol.
However it could be implemented as a softfork with a new witness version for example. Something like this:
Assume an address has 5 UTXOs and you want to spend 2 of it (input 1 and 3) in a transaction while aggregating their signatures: (P2W3 is pay to witness version 3 as an example)
[1][3] are integers saying the follow up signature is for inputs at index 1 and 3 then signature and public key is used in OP_CHECKSIG and witness3 is empty because we have already added the signature for both inputs in witnessB

No, it doesn't matter how much hashrate the group has. This kind of censorship can not take place on bitcoin network, at least not for long.

Basically there are only 2 scenarios where this kind of censorship happens.
1. By a very small group of miners (ie. a smaller % of the hashrate) by companies that are located in certain jurisdictions and cannot or will not move so they have to comply by the regulations and the government pressure. This does not affect the network at all.
This has always been happening. Like the case with MARA pool which is a tiny company with a tiny portion of the hashrate complying with malicious government rules.

2. By a much larger group of miners (ie. a much bigger % of the hashrate) which ends up disrupting the network but only for a short time because there is only 2 ways to move forward, the companies move to another jurisdiction or miners connect to another pool that is not malicious. Or the community is going to introduce a hardfork that bricks their billion dollar investment in one fell swoop.
I don't think this scenario will ever happen because miners who are making a bigger investment and taking a much bigger risk that regular people who just buy bitcoin, are more concerned about health of bitcoin and won't let that happen.

Technically ECSDSA (Schnorr digital signature algorithm) has the defined method to aggregate signatures which could be used to produce a single signature for multiple public [different] keys. Also technically we can add an option where a single signature (regardless of Schnorr) is produced for the same output scripts.
But neither one (as far as I know but definitely not the second one) are going to be added in the upcoming softfork.

What Taproot does is that you can have a more complex spending script that is bigger but you only reveal a portion of it that has to execute, that way you reduce the transaction size. There are also other benefits using Schnorr which include smaller fixed signature size and signature aggregation for multi-sigs.

There is no such thing as reputable and secure exchanges. There are only exchanges that have not yet mass scammed anyone or gotten hacked and became insolvent.

All the arguments about lack of security of storing your bitcoins with third parties aside this is not how bitcoin is supposed to be used. When using bitcoin you are supposed to be "your own bank" not go about using a bank again (or a bank-like service where you have no control). Why bother with volatile bitcoin if you are going to do that anyways?

You sound like someone who believes in fiat not bitcoin, you just own bitcoin because you wish to become fiat-rich otherwise instead of HODLing to dump for fiat at some point you would have used bitcoin as it was meant to be used which is as a currency

Bitcoin as a decentralized money is pretty easy to understand, there is nothing complicated there.
Bitcoin as a new technology using cryptography with a blockchain is hard to understand for those not familiar with these concepts but it doesn't "defy understanding".

Not one as strict as bitcoin.

In a way, yes.
Imagine a product that starts being adopted by more people so the revenue of the producers increase. They decide to expand their production line to satisfy the demand and increase their profit more. They install new production lines, hire more employees, etc. effectively increasing their total production cost since the profit they were making was increased.

Everything has a cap, there is no such thing as unlimited. Even VISA can handle a capped number of transaction rate.

I can tell you who not to trust.
You should never trust a website, even if it is popular. For example you should never trust bitaddress.org website even though it is a popular project. Because it is a website and you can't tell what really is happening when you generate a key there.
You should also never trust a Vanity address creator that generates the key on their own. There is nothing stopping them from saving the key. There was ways to make this safe by just giving them a public key and they work from there but there are some complications involved.
And finally being open source and on Github doesn't mean they are safe. Being that and popular to have their code reviewed by others makes them safe.

Bitcoin, as in the protocol, does not yet have Taproot because the fork has not yet taken place. We have to first reach majority support (ie. 90% of hashrate or more precisely the blocks that were mined to signal their acceptance of it) then it activates. The signalling was just started.
The bitcoin core (reference implementation) has the code for it and is ready to accept the new blocks containing Tapscripts.

It is not about ideology, just being different code and different implementation. Maybe the other one is less efficient (or more) where the mempool code is in a way that takes up more space in memory (or less) so you have to decrease (or can increase) your node's mempool size when running that alternative implementation which also affects your minrelaytxfee.

This case is only for extreme cases when the "size" of the mempool has grown very big not just because fees are high. Each node has a fixed amount of memory a percentage of which it dedicates to running a full node and some portion of that memory goes to its mempool.
As long as the total mempool size is not extremely big (I'd say anything below 300 MB is OK) and the tx fee is at least 1 sat/vbyte it will be propagated.

You forgot to mention what "this" is? Is it bitcoin, some particular altcoin you have in mind, altcoins in general or tokens? They each are different.

Generally speaking you can't predict altcoin movements because their movements are always based on pump and dumps and as manipulations go, a P&D is not predictable ever.

But movements of a particular altcoin or token can be predicted at certain times. For example we all know that tokens that are released are going to be dumped after release as soon as the team holding the majority of it gains access to idiots who are willing to pay money for the vaporware. Or an altcoin that is pumped out of nowhere and has run out of steam is going to get dumped soon.
Same with their pumps, there are certain signs to the shitcoin pumpers. For example they start hyping that shitcoin with some irrelevant news such as its having, release of some new software version, an arbitrary fork, an airdrop... it is also visible on the charts with the increase in volume, obviously increase in price and the buy walls placed by pumpers to artificially push the price up.

If you are looking at bitcoin market it is a different story from above. That is more predictable because the market movements are mostly logical and can be analyzed if you know technical and fundamental analysis. You'll also need some experience to know what makes the market move and what is just there to fool weak hands.
By knowing bitcoin moves you could also predict altcoin moves since they always get dumped no matter what direction bitcoin is going as long as it is going in some direction. In other words 20% rise or 20% fall in bitcoin causes the same dump in altcoins.