Yes and Yes.
Since mining in Proof of Work is based on luck, they could get lucky in that few seconds and find a new block to get the reward before others do which is why they do it.
You can find such blocks on the blockchain, here is a block explorer link you can use to see said blocks that are empty (only have the mandatory coinbase transaction): https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/blocks?q=transaction_count(1)#

In other words another toxic move from Luke who apparently doesn't understand the role consensus plays in bitcoin and has no understanding of the dangers that splitting the bitcoin network has. He did the same thing in 2017 with his BIP148 while hiding the dangers of what he was advertising.

I just hope the malicious software he is advertising this time also ends up using a different user agent so that I can ban all of them easily.

Warren Buffet was right when he said bitcoin is rat poison and this rat poison has been suffocating the rats that is why they are screaming their lungs out about bitcoin. Behavior of Warren the rat is expected, specially when you find out that bitcoin (something he claimed has no value) is worth more than his empire. In fact it surpassed it about 6 months ago when its price was about $30k! Now bitcoin is worth twice that

meh.

I think the time for hyping and panic selling is over. The price is stuck in $50k range so with or without this news there is only 2 possibilities left that we can see in this month.
1. Price stays here and keeps going up and down between $50k and $60k.
2. Price breaks the resistance and shoots to $70k as the panic sellers of last month become the panic buyers of this month.
There is always someone doing something in bitcoin world. The trend is this and they can only speed it up in one direction or the other but not change it.

We have multiple word lists each in a different language but in each word list there is exactly 2048 words (not over it).

To be clear this is a combination of the number of words and the length of the word list but generally speaking the security of the mnemonic comes from the size of the entropy. A 128 bit entropy providing 128 bits of entropy could be encoded using a bigger list to have smaller number of words or a smaller list and have larger number of words but the security remains the same.

It is 2¹²⁸ not 2128 and it is not the number of operations, it is the number of possible values for a 128 bit entropy.
When copying text from elsewhere you should take note of the formatting!

Extension most of the times does not provide additional security because for one users don't use a truly random input as their extension word and also the algorithm used to derive the keys is not strong enough.

Not exactly correct. I alraedy explained why it is not providing security, also it is not "adding more words" it is adding an arbitrary string which can be words or literary anything else like a bunch of emojis or a random password like "jz7P*s&{$Ys5+GoJoA".

You shouldn't just look at the aftermath and imagine the possible profits you could have made. You should look at the whole picture and also imagine all the money that you could have lost.
When you see an altcoin go up 1000% in a short time you should know that it is not natural, it is a fake rise that is known as pump and dump but as you can see the name has 2 parts, it is not just pump it is a pump AND a dump. That coin that went up 1000% will also be dumped equally to go back down and in most case seven lower than the price they started at.

It is extremely hard to make profit from pump and dumps because they are unpredictable. At any moment the manipulators could choose any shitcoin to pump it and at any moment the pump can run out of steam and start being dumped. Sometimes the dumps are very catastrophic that you can't even react to sell before you are at a big loss.

The correct way of doing things is that the miner seeing the new block downloads that block and verifies it and updates its UTXO database. Then if it were valid the miner builds the next block on top of that valid block.

Some miners try to save a tiny amount of time by "spying" on other miners. For example they connect a fake miner to the other mining pools and as the other pool finds a new block their fake miner receives that "hash" of that block which is small (32 bytes only) then the "spy" miner builds their next block based on that hash alone without verifying if the block that was found by the other pool was valid or not (which it may not be valid and during a upgrade/fork the chances of it are higher and that would create a longer stale chain with 2 blocks in it, if more miners do the same this stale chain can become longer).

An indication of this type of mining is empty blocks because when the spy miner hasn't validated the previous block it can not update its UTXO database and doesn't know which transactions were in the previous block (and can't be in the block they mine) so they set their next block to be empty first until they update their UTXO database.

* When you have your bitcoins in an exchange (or any custodial wallet for that matter) you have zero security and zero privacy because the third party controls your money not you.
* Security of a multi-sig versus a single sig is not that different as long as one person is the owner of all keys. Multi-sig scheme is useful for multiple parties or at least if you are both creating and storing the keys separately otherwise it is the same as a single-sig.
* Security of running a full node versus a light client is obviously higher. Being pruned doesn't change the fact that the node is still a full node, it just doesn't store the historical blocks that are too old.
* Security of an offline storage is higher than a hardware wallet and is higher than an online wallet including a full node that is connected to the internet (operating on an online computer).

[I'm not familiar with Specter to comment on it]

Chain analyzers are analyzing the "chain" not the network although that is a possibility but it is a much harder thing to do. However, you do gain additional privacy when running your clients through TOR since it prevents other kinds of attack such as packet sniffing.

Your scenario is an extreme one though, from $60k to $30k is not just a normal drop it is a catastrophic market crash that is not going to happen that easily and is definitely not a regular thing. Usually we see smaller drops of 10% which is actually the most regular thing in this market and bigger "crashes" are around 30% most of the times.
Your exposure and the risks you are talking also decreases by a lot when you consider the smaller size of the drops. But generally speaking shorting is always riskier and shorting bitcoin specially when it is in a bull market has a bigger additional risk.

Nah, it is just short term and in the long run it is actually a good thing for bitcoin since all the money that goes into altcoin market will flee that market the day that the dumping begins and they start losing money. We see this in each cycle when the altcoin pumping season begins and the scammers start ripping people off.

You are right, this is a weak and limited type of attack and there are ways to fight it that are already implemented in bitcoin core. This is also a bigger concern for those who may accept 0-confirmation transactions but at the same time those have more serious things to worry about rather than Sybil attack.
P.S. There is a list here: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Weaknesses

The problem is that the article is looking at a misleading chart and is coming up with a wrong comparison. A single Satoshi back in 2017 was worth between $0.000006 and $0.0002 and that same single satoshi is now worth nearly $0.0006
That means a transaction paying 200 satoshi fee (lets say that is 1 sat/byte) paid $0.04 in 2017 and is paying $0.12 today. That doesn't mean bitcoin transaction fees are at their highest, that means price has growing more than 3 times!
Also if you look at the average block fee (coinbase total output minus reward) you can see that the blocks in 2017 had a massive 10 to 14BTC total while today at the peak they had between 1.8 to 2.2BTC total.

Because setting new ATH values is harder than you think. Although the first half of the year is not yet reached, there are some obstacles that are slowing down the rise including all the margin traders that keep shorting bitcoin and most of the times lose a lot of money in their "gambling games".
There is no rush though and $100k is not as far away as you may think. The rise to $100k is a simple 60% rise and by bitcoin standards that is nothing since we usually see 1000% rises during the bull runs such as this year.

The only type of attack that one can perform by controlling a large number of nodes (not necessarily 51% of them but juts a large number) is Sybil attack. In this attack the attacker fills the network with their own nodes and could connect to your node and fill all its connection slots to effectively cut it off from the rest of the network. Then they can prevent your node from broadcasting transactions, seeing new blocks, etc.

The worst thing that can happen is if Sybil attack is combined with some mining power. The attacker, after isolating the victim's node, could perform a double spend while cutting that node off from seeing the double spent transaction and mine a block to contain an invalid tx (already spent) that pays that node's operator.

I have not seen you talk about bitcoin transaction fees even once. You only mention the word "transaction fees" then talk about the shitcoin known as bitcoin cash. Obviously when you talk about altcoins your topic belongs to altcoin board and will be moved which doesn't seem to have happened to you so I don't know what "censor" you are talking about: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5332700.0

If you are receiving this many transactions then you should think about using a different address type instead of legacy multi-sig (except the 3 P2SH-P2WSH ones). Use the native SegWit address types.
For example in the case of this transaction with a virtual size of 25,236 (2.2 sat/vbyte) if you used P2WSH addresses your transaction's virtual size would have decreased to 9,132 which would have increased the fee rate (same fee amount) to 6 satoshi/vbyte. That's about 3x increase in fee rate by paying the same exact fee (0.00055578BTC).
This would have been even smaller if you were using P2WPKH addresses.

If this is from a custodial wallet that you don't control then you should contact them and demand higher fee instead.
Otherwise your only option is to pay a lot of money (more than you would have paid in fees) to a mining pool (assuming you don't get scammed) to mine this. Or create an additional transaction known as CPFP and pay the fee for that one + the missing fee from this transaction to get it mined automatically without needing to contact a miner or risk getting scammed.

You are just bagholding a lot of shitcoins, the only thing good about your list is that you allocated the biggest percentage to bitcoin so you already know that you are bagholding shitcoins. Looking closer at your list reveals that a lot of them are centralized and all of them are garbage pump and dump coins (maybe with one exception being XMR) which means it makes no sense to call you are doing an "investment", in reality it is a high risk gamble.

This is also NOT a portfolio, it is a bag of garbage. A real portfolio contains assets that are not all following one thing (ie. bitcoin) and get dumped each time that thing makes a move up or down. If you want a real portfolio then buy different assets such as stocks, gold, etc. with the remaining 25% while keeping the 75% in bitcoin.

There isn't much competition for that to push them to improve though. Newbie users who look for a web wallet either use a custodial one like Coinbase or use blockchain.com, otherwise everyone else uses desktop and phone wallets and when they want security they go for hardware wallets. Web wallets don't really have any benefits.
They have also been malicious towards bitcoin ever since 2017 and SegWit softfork which is why their updates in both their wallet and explorer have been too late to come.

The exchanges only report their statistics including their daily trading volume as a whole not based on their users or their geographic location. A bitcoin exchange can have many users coming from numerous countries while reporting (a single) daily volume.
The OTC market where people do P2P trading also doesn't leave any public information for us to use. Services like localbitcoins.com report it which most of the links above are using which is very inaccurate because that only covers a small portion of the P2P market and that also shrank when they started limiting functionality and enforced KYC.

All the exchanges that got hacked and died or scammed their users and ran away were very trustworthy at the time and people were using them a lot. If you could find the historical ranking of exchanges the top 5 with massive volumes change every couple of years.