those who buy/sell bitcoin because of some random topic on bitcointalk aren't going to be left with any bitcoin/money in a couple of weeks. and at this point the market has already shaken out majority of these weak hand newbies already.

not exactly. i actually consult a doctor close to me whom i trust. they are experiencing this first hand. for example the thing about medical staff were actually colleagues of theirs who were in excellent health.

this is an interesting idea and i had a similar one before but it works best in an altcoin not in bitcoin because bitcoin blockchain is not meant for data storage and should not be used that way by principle. it will also be against another correct way of using bitcoin which is to avoid address reuse.

it will also be a much better design if a dedicated altcoin or at least a sidechain with a point system and a reward system were designed to do this.
we can define an "account system" in such altcoin/side-chain where people can find their favorite releases "account" and their releases.
public files like Ubuntu for example could be under an Ubuntu address on that blockchain and downloading it would be as simple as looking inside the blockchain and fetching the hash.
private files (like for P2P sale) could be done by first sending coins to that address while revealing your own public key, then the receiver (who has the hash of the file) can send you the torrent hash encrypted by your pubkey.

this sounds very wrong to me:
for starters bitcoin blocks do NOT store their height anywhere except a push of an integer to the stack inside their signature script (after activation of BIP-34) which can be as big as up to 4 bytes and can be as big as 2,147,483,647.
additionally Wuillies tweet doesn't even mention block height. it is talking about block timestamps that will overflow and although i am not sure about the details of that but i can tell it has nothing to do with height.

you can't find zero fee transactions by only looking at the blocks' total fee though. there can be a couple of thousands of transactions in a block and very early on the "default" behavior changed to setting fee for every transaction and as a result majority of transactions started paying a fee even though it was possible to send 0 fee transactions and get them confirmed. i personally have sent transactions with 0 fee in 2017 which were mined in blocks containing all non-zero-fee transactions.

you can also find many 0-fee transactions today which mainly belong to mining pools paying their miners in a self-made self-mined transaction which makes no sense to have a fee.

there are always 3 major problems with ideas such as this one.
1. a beginner who is never going to research before trusting an offer is also never going to find things like this either. and if they do search they will find enough information online (mainly on forums, etc.) that warns them against such scams.
for example if you search the name of a cloudminer you will find scam accusations and warnings against it or if you don't find anything it is an indication that it is brand new (even if they claim otherwise) and should be avoided.

2. no matter what you say, there is always a certain level of centralization to the system. you already mentioned in your last post "CS webmasters" and "verifiers". there is nothing stopping them from being bribed into hiding a scam report or falsifying one (very similar to ICO benchmarks that scammed people themselvews!) or worse, to be paid to show the "competition" as scammers!

3. and finally cryptocurrency addresses are a one time use tokens, there is nothing stopping a scammer to change their address on each scam. the database could soon grow to need to trillions of addresses.

when you re-install your operating system it doesn't just "delete" files for this action to be undone easily. it is formatting your hard disk and then rewrites everything. the chances of recovering a file on the previous OS is slim.

human beings don't like change, that dislike may have different levels for different individuals but everyone is like that. market trend change is also a change that people don't like specially when they are stuck in one trend and have gotten used to it.
what we had recently is a trend change from more of a stable not being able to break the resistance to breakout, increased volume,...
we had the same thing back in 2018 too when people (me too for a little while) didn't want to believe the bull run is over and it was time for a bear market.

i am not sure how easy or difficult it is to change this simple variable in bitcoin core through the command line but yes essentially it is just a preference that any node can change. older bitcoin core versions had a different setting, other full nodes that are currently running can also have different settings.

it depends on your definition of "worst time". was it really that terrible if you bought at the ATH where price was $10? would you really regret it today why you bought there?

that's the thing about long term investment. you don't look at the short term fluctuations. instead you look far ahead. of course nobody wan'ts to buy at the peak and wants to buy as low as possible and in reality investors buy right in between. for last "cycle" when price went from $150 to $20000 very few bought at those two prices. most others bought in between around $1000 to $2000 and a lot in $200 to $500 unless they were newcomers entering after these prices.
and again even if you had bought at previous ATH (meaning $1200) you were now in ~10x profit! same will be true about this AT (meaning $20k).

things that are not consensus rules aren't really fixed rules and we can't rely on such behaviors. when a transaction is made it will stay valid until eternity or until the inputs of it were double spent. a node can decide to keep the transaction forever or it can decide to drop it after 10 minutes or not even accept or relay it at all.

the default preference for bitcoin core nodes is to keep it for 14 days but even if they dropped it right after 14 days were up they can still receive it again from another node that had it in its mempool and were propagating that transaction.

if you are worried about a transaction disappearing from mempools entirely then you can simply go to your wallet or a block explorer and copy the transaction's full raw bytes in hexadecimal and store it somewhere in a text file or something and then broadcast it yourself if you saw it disappear.

bitcoin is a currency that can work also as a store of value. if it were only a store of value then 1 million coin would have been more than enough!

bitcoin is decentralized so the community must decide not the devs.

if price couldn't rise and it were causing problem for miners to make profit, raising the supply would crash the price and that new reward would be worth a lot less than what they were given before the stupid decision!

not because of miners reward, that's for sure.

every time you create a transaction you reveal your public key, there are even public keys revealed and are on the blockchain that are as old as bitcoin since the very early transactions paid to public key not public key hash like nowadays. you can make your own conclusion!
and you should stop reading topics you don't understand like Pollard's kangaroo topic or any similar ones.

things like this only work in centralized systems such as BCH where people either know they are centralized or don't care about it at all. the owners or the centralized authority that controls the code, nodes and mining (who also performed the 51% attack and nullified BCH immutability for good) can do whatever they want since they have full control.
if someone tried doing the same thing in bitcoin they would create an altcoin that nobody would ever follow because the overwhelming majority in bitcoin are against anything that could introduce the slightest amount of centralization let alone something this big.
there are also enough good developers who would continue working on the decentralized protocol.

it is not negative sense, it is how fiat is!
thanks to fiat's inflation it will always continue losing value. we see extreme cases in currencies such as Lira but it is happening to all fiat currencies. and since we commonly use USD to report bitcoin value, it is no different there either. USD is also losing value over time even if at a slower pace. with the recent super crazy USD printing it has lost a lot of value but it is getting there (to its real value) slowly because it is slowed down by manipulation so people don't get shocked by economy tanking hard and suddenly.

p.s. as a matter of fact part of the reason why bitcoin is rising in value (also gold) is because USD is losing its value.

bitcoin core builds are deterministic or reproducible which means anybody who compiles the same code should end up with the same exact hash. you can find bitcoin core gitian sigs here and the process here and the verification process here

could you post the original transaction with the original signature, because as i replied to your PM this s is still high and you must have made a computational error.

as for the error, you are getting it because your s value has its highest bit set but does not have a starting zero to indicate it is a positive integer.
s = 0xbea5364a573b7be0d1b103f0a79dd781e3bcb6e66c2d90e0a356dbd1ee70cc75
0xbe = 0b10111110
so it has to become 0x00bea5364a573b7be0d1b103f0a79dd781e3bcb6e66c2d90e0a356dbd1ee70cc75

the modified tx with low s assuming the s in OP is not invalid is the following:

the deadline has already passed and he hasn't still eaten his "deal" on national television in was in July and he is now hiding under a rock playing with his "deal" while rolling around in all the money he scammed newbies in 2017 when he made that statement just to gain publicity and rip newbies off.
there is a website with a countdown till the end of the year called "dickening" or something like that too that is counting the days until McAfee runs out of time to perform the "task"...

yeah it was also very humorous when he was scamming all the newcomers in 2017 with all the obviously scam ICOs the kept shoving down their throats because he was paid to do so.

it is possible because it is not created through the conventional way and in other words it does not have a private key.

normally to create an address or a vanity address you have to select a private key then compute its public key and hash of the public key and then encode that hash using the address encoding method using base58 with a checksum.

but an address is still a string that you can create too. so another way of creating an address is without a private key (so you can never spend from it and any coins sent there is lost forever). and that is to start by putting any characters from the base58 set after "1" like this example you posted which uses letter "x" then try decoding it without checking its checksum. now you have the 20 byte hash. use that to compute the address.

it is a possibility but i think there are mainly 3 reasons for the scarcity of testnet coins:
1. developers who use them to test, throw away the keys afterwards without bothering to send the coins back to faucets or give it to others. so practically these coins are brunt.
2. a lot of coins are burnt, i've burnt at least 2 tbtc so far by sending it to bad scripts when i was testing stuff.
3. scammers who have been accumulating tbtc and selling it to some newbies who may fall for it. although this one is very rare since nowadays testnet wallets give a big ass warning to the user that it is worthless.