Round numbers have always been a psychological target for traders. You always see them place orders (buy or sell) at for example $100 not at $100.37 which makes these levels support or resistance depending on the ongoing trend.
But I don't see $55,555.55 having any significance here. Price has been going up and down but it passes that price right away, it is mostly hitting $58.5k level and comes down to $53.5k and then goes back up again which both happen to fall on two sides of $55.5k.
Speaking of round numbers, $60k is the current arbitrary resistance.

Difficulty is more like a human readable value used as a quick way of understanding how "difficult" it is to mine the next block. Otherwise for anything important (verifying blocks proof of work) the target itself is used since it also doesn't lose precision.
Difficulty is calculated by dividing difficulty at smallest target (1) by the current target. details can be found here: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty

You don't need a website or a specialized tool to create a paper wallet because there is nothing special about a paper wallet. It is simply a private key written on a piece of paper. You can just download the main client of the coin you want to create the paper wallet for (in this case Dogecoin core for Dogecoin) and create a new wallet and export one of its private keys with the corresponding address and write that  down on a piece of paper.

It is actually a lot like penny stocks. We have the big one on top called bitcoin (which is like the stocks whether Apple or Microsoft or ...) then we have thousands of useless small assets in a tiny market called penny stocks that have no real value and are only being pumped and dumped in a market called altcoin market instead of penny stocks.

That's ignoring the main characteristics of bitcoin!
The most important thing is that it is delivering what it promised which is a decentralized censorship resistance payment system with high security.
The fact that bitcoin has grown this much has nothing to do with name recognition or being easy to understand because it has neither. With the amount of FUD against bitcoin its name is sullied with a lot of lies and it is extremely difficult for most people to understand how it functions specially since it is different from any other currency they have ever used.

This is actually like the Tulip mania. There is a useless hype called "smart contracts" that so far had no real world applications in the past 6 years that ethereum has existed and it solves nothing. It also was not capable of delivering what it promised. It is both centralized and mutable.
On top of all that it has unlimited supply with a gigantic premine of 72 million.
For now it is being pumped for a couple of weeks maybe but there is no future for such a severely flawed design.

This is more like a centralized shitcoin that isn't good for anything other than short term pump and dumping.
It is also known as a scam coin specially since it had to scam people to force them into buying it. Like what bitcoin.com did when people went to that site clicked "buy bitcoin" gave their "bitcoin" address but they received bcash instead!

Exactly and I say that manipulation is not a bad thing to have in this market because the more of it we have the more resilient the market participants are going to become against such manipulations.
For example a panic seller who sold their bitcoin because of some FUD and lost a lot of money on reversal is going to think twice when the next time they spread some FUD again. That diminishes the effects of FUD in general.
Similarly when a panic buyer buys some shitcoin that they are trying to pump and then loses a lot of money when they dump on them they learn not to "invest" in anything other than bitcoin.

You cannot tell how much profit someone has made (if any at all) by looking at the charts. You have to know when they have made the investment and what they invested (fiat or bitcoin) in that shitcoin.
For example if OP had bought ETH back in 2017 with bitcoin, then he is in at least 60% loss today even though ETH is super pumped right now. But if he had invested fiat in ETH then he has increased his fiat by 146% but that also means that he didn't invest that fiat in bitcoin which means a profit of 146% instead of 650% which is another kind of loss.

Different time frames will result in different loss % but the long term altcoin investment will always result in a loss nonetheless. Short term trading altcoins on the other hand can result in a massive profit because they get pumped and dumped and if you can jump ship before the dump begins you will always make a good profit.

The interest is definitely increasing but unfortunately just like the early days of any technology we are seeing a lot of vaporware and scams in the market too. For example the shitcoins you claim to be bag holding, namely BCH and ETH are two good examples of scam and vaporware respectively.
I expect the same hype and doom cycle in the altcoin world as the new people pour into the market and end up being encouraged to buy these shitcoins as the "better" options.

You can easily calculate it on your own. We can't tell you that because it depends on the size of your transaction.
A normal transaction containing a single P2WPKH input and 2 P2PKH outputs is about 180 bytes and with the current lowest fee rate of 3 sat/byte you have to pay 540 satoshi in total fee which is about $0.3

Considering the fact that the drop below $60k had nothing to do with Tesla at all, any future sales from them is not going to change anything about bitcoin price either.

There is no such thing as "inflow" or "outflow" of coins from exchanges because the bitcoin transactions have no "intention" field inside them telling us where the coin comes from or where it goes to and more importantly why.
Not to mention the coins that are claimed to go to an exchange may not even go there since blockchain analysis is pretty weak. And those that are associated with going to exchange may be the exchange itself moving its coins around to and from cold storage.

You made it more complicated rather than making it simpler
It is also not about "leading zeros" but a very simple integer comparison where we want a to be smaller than or equal to b and for example 0035 is bigger than 0031 and is rejected even though both have 2 leading zeros.

A simple explanation of mining IMO would be to compare it with rolling a dice.
Imagine if you wanted to get a number that is smaller than 3. You roll the dice and you have a chance of getting 2 and win on your first try but if you get something bigger like 5 you have to roll again. You do this random work of rolling the dice until you get a number that is smaller than or equal to your target.
That's mining. The only "math" in it is the integer comparison.

It's just the English word list though. The newer word lists that were added in the following years after the initial release were have been getting more and more strict about what kind of words they include in their list. For example they reject any word that could be turned into another word by only replacing 1 or 2 letters (ie. have small Levenshtein distance).
The problem is that for backward compatibility we can't get rid of the old English word list and also nobody has bothered coming up with a better one so far.

It is due to value type of the output amount field being a signed 64-bit integer (Int64) not the CPU architecture being 64-bit. You'll get the same overflow using Int64 on a 32-bit computer too.

That doesn't sound like eBay is looking into "crypto payment options" exactly. It seems like they are looking for a way to create their own shittoken and tell people to use that token to make payments which is not a good news at all. In fact it is the exact opposite specially if they use a centralized platform to create that token which is notoriously known for being buggy and easy to fork to undo transactions (ie. is not immutable).

Imagine the inevitable day when their shittoken built on top of a shit smart contract platform blows up in their face and people lose billions of dollars. They won't blame their own stupidity, they will blame cryptocurrencies in general and spread FUD about bitcoin which had nothing to do with any of that.

There is no problem with centralized payment systems. The problem is with your comparison of apples and oranges.

If you want to compare a centralized shitcoin then you have to compare it with other centralized payment systems and then you will see that they are performing terribly. In other words
- when the choice is between decentralized bitcoin and centralized shitcoin the choice is always bitcoin.
- When the choice is between centralized shitcoin and a centralized regulated and trustworthy payment system like VISA the choice is the centralized regulated payment system because it is working within the law and is not controlled by some shady company that could be shut down by the government.

What are you talking about, there is no halving in near future or near past. We are roughly between the two halvings and ATH prices don't happen on halving, they happen a long time after the halving. For example the bitcoin halving before the previous ATH in 2017 happened in mid 2016. The last halving we had happened mid 2020.
So if anything the new ATH should happen similar to 2017 by the end of 2021!

As for the shitcoin known as ETH, it is not rising at all, in fact it has been dumping ever since 2017 with small dead cat bounces. Back in 2017 when it was pumped this shitcoin reached 0.15BTC and has been dumping consistantly to the point where it lost 94% of its value.
Now that bitcoin is temporarily stable all shitcoins are pumping which is why ETH also went up a little to 0.06BTC which is still 60% dumped.
Shitcoins like this are lucky because when they get dumped against bitcoin 94% but bitcoin price goes up 1770% the shitcoin prices in USD seems like rising while in reality they have been dumping slowly.

It is like when you are on a train and walk in the opposite direction (to the back of the train), when someone looks at you from outside they still see you moving forward in the same direction as the train but in reality you are walking backwards.

There is no currency in form of "digital metals". The precious materials have been only considered as investments (such as gold) and haven't been used as a currency for a very long time whether in physical or digital form.
Also you should note that there is a difference between digital currencies and crypto currencies. There is also the difference between centralized and decentralized currencies.

What we have today is a super category that includes centralized fiat in digital form issued and controlled by the banking system and we have decentralized cryptocurrency (that is bitcoin) in "crypto" form and centralized cryptocurrencies (that is many of the altcoins) in "crypto" form both using blockchain technology.

Yes. It's the same collision principle as with keys <> addresses.
Bitcoin private keys are 256 bits while the addresses (most of them) are 160 bits that means there is more than one private key corresponding to each address. The reason why we will never actually find such a collision is because 2¹⁶⁰ is huge.
Similarly BIP32 key derivation uses a 256-bit key + a 256-bit chain code in HMACSHA512 so there is even more master keys that correspond to a single child address. In simple terms we could say that theoretically there exists xprv1 and xprv2 that generate completely different addresses except one.

The additional options are not exactly for "withdrawal" but for "transferring" coins. For that reason they are useful for traders.

For example imagine if bitcoin price on Binance was higher than bitcoin price on X. You can technically transfer bitcoin to X using one of these centralized shittokens that are cheaper and fast to transfer bitcoin to X and sell it there, then you can also use X to transfer the money back to Binance using another centralized shittoken like USDT and then buy back bitcoin on Binance and make a profit.
This is called Arbitrage trading and is one of the only reason why centralized shittokens have gained popularity despite being terrible and shady like tether.

There is no "bitcoin" to store on USB disks or any medium like that, the "bitcoins" are stored in the blockchain that any full node will store publicly. What you actually store is the keys that could spend those "coins" that exist on the blockchain.
And a bitcoin private key is simply a number that can be stored anywhere, you can encode it using a human readable format like the Base58Check encoding aka WIF and write it down on a piece of paper or  you could store it as binary in digital form on a digital medium such as USB disks, hardware wallets, ...

A separate category is more suitable for merge mined coins than just categorizing them under side-chains because of the following differences:

• A merge mined coin doesn't have any transaction in bitcoin blockchain, just a small hash that it uses for its mining in bitcoin's block's coinbase. A side-chain on the other hand has to have transactions in bitcoin blockchain to "peg-in" and "peg-out", it basically "converts" bitcoin to the side-chain coin.
• A merge mined coin can be mined individually too without the merge mining in bitcoin. So if bitcoin stopped today, or if you wanted to mine it without mining bitcoin you can still continue mining the merge mined coin regularly since the merge mined coin nodes don't care what the additional data used in their PoW (AuxPOW) is. Even though a side chain can also operate without bitcoin, it has to make changes to its protocol to be able to do that. That means if bitcoin stopped today the side-chain won't die but will keep going but with a fixed supply equal to the last total pegged-in value without being able to increase/decrease it further.
  
  
  Quote from: OgNasty on May 03, 2021, 07:45:15 PM
  I'm also curious about the reasons why merge mined coins seemed to never reach the popularity of side chains as described above and certainly not the valuation. 
  
  It is hard to know this without extensive study, but it comes down to the same reason why most altcoins aren't popular which is lack of interesting utility that has an overwhelming demand in real world.