Research on BIP38.

Please do not put your funds into any pre-generated wallet. Unless you trust the person who sold you the wallet, you're potentially going to get robbed since there are others that would also know your private key.

If you want to store your funds in a paper wallet, generate them yourself, securely.

You're minimizing the number of attack vectors by the choices of wallet that you make.

An air-gapped hardware wallet would probably suffice for most uses. Air-gapped wallets are secure because you're eliminating the most common attack vector; malware or rather the way for malware to communicate. The problem being that most users don't know how to properly set up and maintain one. As with the side-channel attacks, secp256k1 has properties that minimizes leaks with the side-channel so it isn't that great of a concern. Side-channel attacks are generally far more expensive and requires more technical expertise.

Number of nodes isn't the only metric to determine decentralization; how much control any entity has or has the potential to affect the network in any manner will affect the degree of decentralization. You can also argue that having mining pools makes it less decentralized than desired where the industry is largely dominated by larger farms. You can also argue that having a group of people dictating what goes into the "reference" client arguably doesn't make it decentralized. The counter argument being people can run whatever clients that they want; but Bitcoin's function or its "branding" depends on the economic majority.

You can't label Bitcoin as being the most "decentralized". There are tons of areas which Bitcoins, or cryptos in general are deficient in. But they are the lesser of the evils.

Let's say I price my products at 0.1BTC and the current cost of 0.1BTC when compared to fiat is about $3000, but the actual product only costs $50. Would people still want to buy it?

Using fiat as a comparison to BTC will always be the case so long as there isn't a barrier to exchanging fiat to BTC or vice versa. People will always compare BTC to fiat as it is the de facto currency used by most people and it doesn't make sense to over-price your product just to maintain that 1BTC = 1BTC. You can easily compare the value of the product and assert that it isn't worth 0.1BTC, more like 0.0015BTC instead. As there is no price parity, no one would ever purchase something that overpriced.

Electrum private server is pretty much the most straightforward and least resource intensive way of going about it.

The purpose of your full node is mostly as a data source. You can connect to any full node to push a transaction.

I've used this wallet (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.schildbach.wallet&hl=en) which allows you to connect to specific nodes only.

You can freeze specific UTXOs in Core. Coin control gives you control over the UTXOs that you can use.
IIRC, Mycelium uses their own server. Certain Android wallets are SPVs which gives the user the liberty to specify their full node provided that it has a bloom filter. Else, you can go with Electrum on Android but it requires you to specifically run an Electrum server.

Actually, you can just push the transactions to mempools directly through a full node but I imagine most people aren't very interested in that.

Most people probably would just use Bitcoin Core alone without having to loop through an Electrum instance.

I'd say it's good if you absolutely need to use Electrum but using Bitcoin Core would be far simpler. With pruned node, you can't really scan the transactions beyond the prune limit. Anyhow, it seems to be quite limited in functionality.

Most wallets uses the combinations of inputs from each of your addresses to produce a change that isn't dust or if it is, then it would be consumed in the TX fees. Dust is non-standard anyways and it is quite unlikely that even with the current threshold that you will produce an output that would cost more to spend it.

A few satoshis are not worth anything. Either you're going to lose those few satoshis by rounding it down or just leave it as it is.

You did mention about how the individual creates the wallet, any software wallet that you are using will not reveal any unnecessary information to a third-party during a wallet creation. If yours does that, then you should stop using it.
No. VPNs are not designed for privacy beyond encryption of the traffic between the VPN server and your computer. Your VPN provider is able to intercept your traffic, see the origins of your traffic and perhaps decipher plain-text traffic as well. There is a reason why people don't recommend using VPNs if you are really concerned about your privacy.

It's easier to be doing the minimum work than to be doing the most work.

Anyone can do minimal work but as you increase the threshold, then the size becomes exponentially smaller.

No. Taproot primarily benefits scripting whereby not all of the possible spending conditions are fulfilled revealed and specifically, Schnorr signatures allows for PK aggregation.

Neither of those are current ChipMixer's usecase, where the private keys are prepared before the user initiates a session and the addresses are normal P2PKH or P2WPKH.

It isn't. You don't have to reveal your identity to create an address or a wallet for that matter. Software wallets do not fingerprint you.

Or use a dropship. You can use an air-gapped wallet as well but that is subjected to your technical competency, a paper wallet might not be as secure, depending on how you generate and use it.

VPN doesn't provide sufficient privacy for the user. In fact, some of them keep logs and actively tries to break your privacy. Don't use VPNs if you want to preserve your privacy.

I never really recommend people to generate seeds outside of their hardware wallets. If you're using a hardware wallet, the seeds should be generated within the hardware wallet which is a completely isolated environment with little risks of it getting compromised. Most people are often unable to properly create a truly isolated and sanitized environment and that makes this a pretty bad idea.

If you are thinking of creating your own seed outside of your hardware wallet, then you might be better off not spending a hundred bucks on a hardware wallet and instead just use an air-gapped wallet. Having a seed generated on an offline computer pretty much guarantees that the seed is only as secure as how you've generated the seed in the first place.

If you were to directly relate capacity to actual transaction count, then it isn't accurate.

As you said, Segwit allows blocks to be bigger. Let's compare, if we were to have a full SW block full of 1-to-1 P2WPKH TXes and a full legacy block full of 1-to-1 P2PKH TXes, which of them would have a larger transaction count? Of course, both adhering to their own rules.

It depends on how you define taint, it is such a broad definition that you almost always can twist it around to suit your goals. Most often, taint is determined by tracing the paths of the coin, with the UTXOs created having assigned some level of taint and decays with the number of transactions that it is associated with. It doesn't make sense to label every tainted coins the same, because almost all of the coins are tainted.

I understand that the current general take is that taint isn't assigned to block rewards from the TX fees. But it doesn't make sense as it'll just provide the miners a way to obtain clean coins without much effort; by including the tainted coins as fees. It remains to be seen if that would change anytime soon.

This isn't true. Most would still consider it as tainted, even if a portion of it gets sent to a random address.

The amount of Bitcoins you hold in Electrum doesn't really matter. A hardware wallet is better because it is designed to be secure enough from most attacks.
That is a social engineering attack. There is no telling of how zero-day exploits or just exploits in general can pop up. There are potential attack vectors and you can't possibly guard against all of them. An airgapped wallet should protect against most but hardware wallet is quite dummy-proof and gives sufficient protection against attacks while maintaining the convenience factors.

You can't combat ignorance with time, Bitcoin is such a novel and complex subject that any mis-information is likely to be taken as it is and spread like wildfire. Majority of the investors are not interested in knowing the technical workings of Bitcoin and thus it is easy for the mass media to manipulate the perception of the people. Like it or not, FUD is something that is intrinsically difficult to eliminate with Bitcoin.

Yes. They are both scams.

No but there are far better avenues to manipulate the prices.

FUD being the most obvious, lack of research by the average investors puts them vulnerable to many kinds of FUD and results in them panic selling.

There has been evidence that Mt Gox operated bots to artificially game the price before their collapse. I wouldn't rule out exchanges to not be having a hand at any potential market manipulation.

There is a reason why Bitcoin Mining Consortium was formed. Elon Musk wouldn't stop harping on Bitcoin's energy consumption and as you know, the price dropped rapidly. Given the FUD being spread by one of the more influential personalities, miners definitely want to appease him to try to push the price up again.

It doesn't help that the one thing that is hailed as the currency of the future is facing an issue that is perceived to exacerbate climate change.

It isn't a reason to use renewable energy but it is a reason to tell everyone they're using renewable energy.