if you trade in Forex (exchanging national currencies against each other) does it prevent you from using any of those fiats as a currency? obviously no. things are not different when you trade bitcoin against any of those fiats either. it is just in another market where you trade a currency called bitcoin with it being more volatile than other currencies since it is new and has a small market.

i find it very odd to talk about something that is too far away in the future. it would be like talking about what started in January 2018 all the way back in middle of 2016 because that is where we are right now, close but still far from the previous ATH breaking of which is a long process itself. then we enter the big bull run that comes after all of which can last for over a year.

you are thinking about the end of the bubble which was the lat 2 or 3 months of 2017 not the START of the bull run. the start was in 2016 when price broke out of $400 IIRC. similarly the start of this bull run was when price broke out of $4000.

it is unclear what you mean by "convert".
you can't convert the Electrum mnemonic to another mnemonic like BIP39, however you can derive the master private key (starting with xprv) and that string is universally accepted and understood by all HD wallets and as long as you know the derivation path, you can get the same addresses.
as for the web tool (Coleman's) i wouldn't suggest it for cold storage, i prefer desktop apps written in any language other than JS that don't rely on my browser to run.

only the first and possibly the third points here could be categorized as "criticism", number 2 and 4 is purely FUD, 5 comes from lack of understanding of what a currency truly is which has nothing to do with bitcoin and the last one is not even a criticism, it is a prediction that could be used in different contexts to mean different things. in context of advertising a shitcoin it becomes a lie, in context of manipulators becomes FUD and in other context it is stating the obvious that every technology is some day replaced by something else!

you didn't need to copy the address here, only the seed phrase for the backup and the master public key for the online watch-only wallet which will create all the same addresses from this wallet using the MPK.

there are some additional steps here (to _spend_ your bitcoin). you basically need a dual setting, one offline one online.
you do the steps quote on your offline machine to sign the transactions while the MPK is on the online machine and creates the unsigned tx and broadcast the signed one later.
details can be found here: https://electrum.readthedocs.io/en/latest/coldstorage.html

i also strongly suggest testing all these steps before using it for real. you could use testnet coins for free and without any worries.
https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/76598/how-to-get-electrum-3-1-3-on-bitcoin-testnet
some faucets:
https://testnet-faucet.mempool.co/
https://bitcoinfaucet.uo1.net/
https://coinfaucet.eu/en/btc-testnet/

if it were to "poke" every brainless monkey whom i know in real life or online and had made some stupid comment about bitcoin then i wouldn't have time to do anything else in my life. and i have been around for 6 years so i know quite a lot of them! not to mention that it is pointless to just poke the person alone.

however, i think that sometimes it is good to remind other people of the idiocy of these people and how FUD works. for example recently someone bumped a topic in speculation board which i liked because it was a good reminder about how they operate during any kind of dip. and that has educational merit.

the problem is that most people don't have any contingency plan, they get used to a routine and never think about anything else. this is mostly the problem in developed countries. studies show majority of Americans don't even have any money saved up!
so to answer your question, most people used it for their primary needs instead of thinking about investing it. and a one time thousand bucks isn't really that much money to begin with for people like that.

i don't think so. bitcoin was bearish for nearly 2 years, you can't expect the bear market to extend indefinitely. at some point it has to come to an end. and it was ended before the pandemic even began and the massive growth was there preventing it from going any other way than bullish.

does it? i think it mostly shows that there are a lot of people with a ton of PayPal money that were more than willing to trade with bitcoin if the opportunity arose. and as soon as it did, they jumped at it. keep in mind that before PayPal started this feature there were a lot of demand and a lot of trades outside of their platform to trade PayPal for bitcoin. now it is official and a lot safer.

technically in cryptography the term "seed" is referred to the random string of bits that is used as the input to a deterministic function to derive keys. so in this context the "entropy" used at the very beginning of BIP39 is indeed the "seed". then we derive what we can refer to as "BIP32 seed" or maybe a "derived seed".

for example this is how NIST defines seed for pseudo-random RNGs which is similar to what we do in BIP32/39 which are deterministic RNGs:

a good point, but considering the fact that said altcoins are copies of bitcoin that are copying its every move it stands to reason to assume they would also make the transition (in an even easier manner since most of them are centralized or very small) to the new algorithm.

the checksum is always for error detection not recovery. recovery is like a side effect of it but it is not needed, having a checksum makes the recovery faster since it is only computation of a hash rather than 4000-8000 hashes + EC point multiplication that comes afterwards.

it is easy to damage the physical backups, for example a piece of paper that was torn or the ink faded over the years, ... it could also be bad handwriting, or simply writing the word wrong (eg. writing 11 words out of 12).

yes, the cost and ineffectiveness of such an attack is the preventing force.
the attacker first has to come up with about $3 billion, then has to manufacture about 1 to 1.2 million ASICs and find enough electricity to feed these machines to run and also cool them and also find the money to cover the cost of electricity and cooling. now they have about 51% of the total hashrate they start to realize that performing it attack is hard.
assuming they did all that and succeed, such a malicious attack puts bitcoin on a path of a hardfork which will in a short time change the mining algorithm and turns their billion dollar investment into dust.

they can only double spend a transaction they initiated themselves (meaning a transaction they made and have the private key to the outputs that were spent in it) not any other transaction and they can not confirm anything that is invalid.

doing any of this (apart from double spending) can be performed using a single CPU (not even an ASIC) because it is a hard fork that changes the consensus rules (eg. confirming invalid tx, reversing other people's txs,...) to create a new altcoin (just like the hundreds of altcoins that were created back in 2017 and 18) and their blocks are easily rejected by the entire bitcoin network.

i like this idea a lot. both learning and writing markdown is so much easier than bbcode, there is lots of resources to google and figure out details if it were needed. most people should already have seen it while using reddit already so it is not something brand new to them.

i don't like the multi option though, going full markdown is better in my opinion.

that is not the point of bitcoin! the supply is capped to prevent inflation and also have a predefined and clear supply distribution plan that can not be easily changed on a whim like fiat. at some point when adoption has already grown enough the value increase will stop and the only rise we will see is in price against fiat whenever fiat value drops due to its inflation.

we bitcoiners can encrypt messages with the tools we already have without installing additional software. it needs AES (which all wallets have) and HMAC-SHA function which all deterministic wallets have and a public key which we can fetch from our wallet or from the person we want to send the encrypted message to.
i used OP's public key found on their profile (04e31f13f55c8bd626a32bf9ad93744e1cb3a4ec4b5efe1cce89e06687aa7bec7476ca4a343bdaf 9b5db1042966c0a8284a2e293ea7901d5284f4bd29cc6d26a40)

the process is known as ECIES and Electrum already has an easy to use implementation of it to encrypt and decrypt messages.

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i realized that the example above can only be decrypted by OP (it needs private key) so here is an example with its private key revealed (on testnet):

these are 4 items that are being pushed to the stack. since the output being spent is a P2SH output, the last item is a redeem script. and since the redeem script is OP_3 <pub><pub><pub><pub><pub> OP_5 OP_CheckMultiSig (a 3of5 multi-sig) it means it has to have at least 3 signatures on the stack which makes the remaining 3 items above to be signatures, which they are 3 signatures from 3 of the keys inside the redeem script.

when trades take place peer to peer then there is no volume being recorded anywhere to be reported later. there isn't exactly a platform to report it either, the "platform" is mostly a place where the two parties meet each other to make the trade in private without the rest of the world knowing about its details.
if it is any other way, then the method can not be called P2P anymore.

a bit OT but this made me thinking that if we modify BIP39 a little we can come up with some cool things. for instance we can increase the "padding" (checksum size) to not be the minimal but be the similar size as what we add to a WIF for instance (32 bits). for example for 128-bit entropy instead of padding with 4 bits we can pad with 26 bits which adds 2 more words but makes recovery A LOT faster due to far less collision. eg. recovering missing 2 words takes about an hour but with a bigger checksum it takes less than a minute.

exactly. people sometimes forget that the price rise didn't start yesterday, figuratively speaking. for instance in case of the PapPal news, price was already rising long before that news came out then it contributed to a little bit of hype then things went back to normal. it is the same with drops too, we see some panic sells for a short time (creating the dip) then things go back to normal again as price keeps rising.

no all indices covers the entire range and can be between 0 and the max value (0xffffffff).
the only thing that changes is the way we derive the child keys. if the highest bit of the index is set, it is a hardened key and the respective method for hardened keys is used and if it is not set we use the other method for non-hardened keys. it doesn't matter what depth the index is at.