They have always been very active, you can check the github repository's pulse every month or the commit history to see all that activity. It's just that they are releasing more versions this month because of the bugs that appear to be affecting Lightning Network usage and have to be fixed.

The problem comes from the fact that Electrum writes the wallet file in simple JSON format which it looks up later so a better approach would be to use everything in Electrum except parts of the wallet layer.
It would require more work but theoretically with some modification to the code you could replace the wallet file (the way it is written to disk and read) with a database instead so that looking up inside millions of inputs becomes super fast and use that with the rest of the Electrum code for signing, downloading txs and blocks from nodes, ...

We want to compute the most expensive operations (ie. ECDSA and possibly hashing) concurrently not the simplest ones that don't take that much time to begin with. For example checking values in each transaction is a simple Int64 comparison and I believe it is 1 CPU cycle. Additionally we have to look up each UTXO in the database which I don't believe can be parallelized.

It sounds easy but it has to be actual code and be benchmarked to see if it actually increases the speed or not specially for a block like this (DB is from UTXO database that we already have from all the previous blocks):

Keep in mind that these are uncharted waters, we are no longer below previous ATH that meant certain people had predefined unreasonable sell targets. Consequently the resistance against the current rise should be a lot less and the more time price stays above $20k the stronger the momentum will become.
Although the rise has slowed down but the momentum has also been very strong and hasn't gone away yet. We can expect more rises like what we had over the past 4 days to be repeated soon.

Anything that comes from a company that runs a business is going to always be centralized and should be avoided. Blockstream is not an exception. In fact this is one of the many reasons why this wallet was removed from bitcoin.org ever since it changed ownership and the code was modified significantly that nobody reviewed it after the change.

It is a terrible idea because people should never invest (in anything) the money they can not afford to lose. This is not bitcoin related at all, the risk is just too high that makes it unacceptable. Buying a home with a loan from the bank makes sense because there aren't any other options most of the times and people want to live in that home not to mention that the market is so much less volatile. Otherwise if it is an investment (instead of wanting to live there) it still becomes very risky and should be avoided. When it comes to bitcoin the risks is higher (same as the reward being higher) and that means it should not be done.

Besides when you take a loan you have to pay the bank back and if it is invested in something you have to pay them from your own pocket or sell that thing to pay them, both cases mean loss. And what if that thing didn't go up in price and simply stayed the same or worse continued to dump?

Obviously!

But the important thing that we can not predict is when and how much. If price continues rising and reaches for example $25k then the correction could be back to $22k, if it goes higher like $35k then the correction would be $30k but if it stops here ($23777) then the correction is what we already have (down to $22360) and anything lower than $21k-$22k would not be correction anymore.

Bitcoin is not anonymous but it doesn't mean the transactions can be traced back to the actual person that made them. That is simply impossible unless the person had knowingly created a link between their address(es) and their identity like joining some sort of centralized service and giving up their identity to them!

All centralized services specially those handling money have always been forced to implement KYC long before bitcoin was even created!

Not transactions, but trades.
That means when you only trade bitcoin to make profit, you have to pay a hefty tax. But if you are using bitcoin as it  was meant to be used (ie. as a currency) there is no tax.

The purpose of bitcoin was to build a decentralized censorship resistant global payment system and regulating some centralized services for traders is not changing that at all!

Using GPUs is mostly about parallelization and generally speaking brute forcing is the most parallelizable operation. additionally brute forcing BIP38 has a couple of parts, mainly the AES computations and the scrypt. Both of them exist separately as mining algorithms in different altcoins for instance brute forcing scrypt is basically mining Litecoin with the difference that in BIP38 you can run it on 8 cores in parallel and it uses slightly more memory (1024 bytes instead of 128) per round.
I believe with a well written code the speed gain over GPU can be significant.

In a perfect world transactions in a block could be verified in parallel but in reality each tx can reference another output that was created in the same block earlier which makes the code a lot more complicated and can create bottlenecks that slows the verification process down.

We've already got some optimization though. For instance in SegWit the hashes don't have to be computed for every input in a tx, most of it can be cashed and only a much smaller hash be computed. Or with Schnorr (upcoming) we can perform batch verification instead of verifying each signature alone.

The 2017 percentages had very little to do with altcoins being bullish. It was mainly because of the sheer number of shitcoins that were created in a short time with huge supplies and since market cap is simply price multiplied by these supplies that percentage shrank and when some of these shitcoins died it went back up. But the creation hasn't stopped so the percentage is still at around 65% and it has never represented dominance.

Wasabi is written in C# and its dependency NBitcoin used to depend on BouncyCastle, don't know how much of it is changed now.
BitcoinJ (written in Java) and by extension any wallet/tool created on top of it (which are a lot) depend on BouncyCastle for a lot of their cryptography.
Mycelium (written in Java) has a dependency on BouncyCastle.

Whether this vulnerability affects any of these wallets, I do not know.

Creating an exact copy of something and changing its name while decreasing its security is not an upgrade.

Wrong. Bitcoin has never split into anything. People have been creating poor copies of it for ages but they are not "splitting bitcoin".

Wrong. That is not how Proof of Work works. There is no "10 min window" at all in PoW.

Bitcoin is as optimized as it gets and so far there hasn't been anything better in having faster cheaper transactions while remaining decentralized.
BTW creating tokens to scam people (ie. what ETH, ... do) is not called "utility". Smart contracts exist in bitcoin and if any more advanced contracts were needed and had any real world application they would have been added to bitcoin. There is also sidechains (eg RSK) and a ton of other things built on top of bitcoin (eg. Omni layer) with much more advanced smart contract capabilities.

I disagree, what gives anything value is their utilities meaning bitcoin value comes from its utility as the decentralized currency. Scarcity is only a contributor to increase of that value not its reason.

Not the network but the "blockchain" is immutable. And it is not time-dependent, it is timestamped.

Neither. It is:
Utility > value (then it is ) more adoption > higher value (then it is) fixed supply > deflationary > increasing value.

Whereas in contrast for altcoins such as ethereum:
Lack of utility > no value and dumping in long term (then) less adoption or no adoption > lower value (and finally) unlimited supply > inflationary > decreasing value.

- LTC has been around nearly as long as bitcoin and it doesn't even have 10% of bitcoin's adoption. Conclusion: faster block time means absolutely nothing when the coin is the exact copy of bitcoin
- XMR has terrible scaling issues but since it is the only decent "anon coin" it has a niche use case hence has value.
- BSV is a shitcoin and is the exact copy of bitcoin hence it is completely useless as it is evident from both its price and the number of transactions it has been processing.

Your mistake is that you think these are "upgrades" when actually these are simply changes each targeting arbitrary things that have actually added vulnerability to the otherwise secure protocol.

So far this momentum has been very strong and exactly because of the amount of money that has been coming in price reached $23777 and then the correction was simply to $22400. Three days of sustained momentum is a good sign so it is starting to become safe to say that below $20k prices are prices that we should kiss goodbye for good.

The same arguments could be made for literary anything else as long as the person you are telling this about is not familiar with that thing. For example if you try to introduce cars and how to drive them to someone who has never even seen a car you will get the same "blank stare" when you try describing what the 3 pedals are for. You can't say that is a flaw in cars just because it takes a lot of effort to learn how to use them.

If network congestion is your only argument then you have to know that ethereum network congestion is 10 times worse than bitcoin's not to mention that ETH 2.0 has never even addressed these issues despite what ETH pumpers want you to believe, it was mainly a hype mainly to pump it up.
the fact is that ethereum is too flawed to even be considered for anything serious.

You are terribly wrong here. Stable coins are the most centralized coins in cryptocurrency world, their only usage is a niche one for traders and nothing more. Not to mention that his "banking ecosystem" that you are talking about will never even touch any of them, instead they are creating their own shitcoin.

Why not? Coinbase is malicious as a wallet provider since it is centralized and invading its users privacy very easily and also works with the government reporting their users' every move but it still is a successful and very old company that has been making a ton of money from their services including their bitcoin exchange which has a high daily volume. Seems like something investors would be very interested in.

Using a data <> hash relation in script makes sense but it is not safe because the moment that the "data" is revealed anyone else can also spend that transaction by providing the same data to be hashed and setting their own destination instead.

The only "agreement" we can come up with is between users and the miners. All those receiving dust transactions can create a single transaction that contains all those dust inputs and pay the entire amount (which probably won't be bigger than 10 bucks) to that miner as fee.
Something like mining all those 1 satoshi 0 satoshi outputs a couple of years ago by I believe Antpool.