Even if we assume that Bitcoins were never lost, the final value wouldn't be 21 million either. Bitcoin's supply decreases exponentially and the theoretical maximum value of 21 million will never be reached due to the smallest denomination being
a satoshi.

Remember, if everybody seems rich, then no one is rich. Barring something like a mass adoption happening, a 500K Bitcoin would mean something like a 10 trillion market cap. Bitcoin would have to be having a great demand in the first place.

Why bother? Most users don't do anything that would require searching for transactions not related to their wallet nor would they need anything with txindex. Keeping an additional indexing introduces extra resource requirements and a longer synchronization for something that the users won't need. Don't think there is any plans for any block explorer in Bitcoin Core.

You need to reindex if you want to use txindex. Keeping it turned off is probably far better.

Secure element doesn't matter all that much in terms of securing the keys from malware. The purpose it serves is to make it harder for it to be extracted via physical attacks. Malware attacks are mitigated by designing the firmware and bootloader to not arbitrarily communicate sensitive information over the USB. Secure element doesn't ensure this, the MCU does. Secure elements mostly acts as a storage medium.

In certain hardware wallets, the private keys has to be exposed  to the MCU for transaction signing as certain secure elements are incapable of signing transactions. The environment is still sanitized nonetheless.

Yes. Just install Bitcoin Core, replace the wallet.dat with your own.

Note that you won't be able to see any up to date transactions or funds unless you synchronize it either with a bootstrap file or with the blockchain files. I'd advice you to just find a clean computer, import and synchronize it to avoid leaving any funds in it if you're thinking of shifting to Electrum.

The password change applies to the wallet file only. If the password is correct, the wallet can be decrypted, even if your other backups had their password changed. The purpose of doing it offline is for the security but even so, it requires the use of a clean computer that has never been connected to the internet for maximum efficacy.

Sufficient. Most third party cannot link the two sets of addresses generated by the two wallets as long as you don't unintentionally spend the funds from both the wallets in the same transaction or send the funds between them.

There also runs the risk of your wallet client tracking you. If possible, I'll just use Wasabi wallet. The next best alternative would be to use Electrum but use a separate and different Tor/VPN when using the two wallets.

Perhaps. Don't forget he has done a few dubious things to his own company and told everyone he thought Tesla was overpriced.
I doubt miners actually care about using renewable or sustainable energy at all. Economics of mining makes it such that miners will always choose the cheapest energy source there is. Miners don't have to care about using it either, it doesn't influence the price. They're doing this to appease Elon and to hopefully pump the price up further. There isn't any conscious effort for miners to mitigate, or at least the majority of it, instead it'll be more accurate to say that they're always mitigating to a cheaper energy source. Trying to greenwash people by telling them that a few companies are environmentally conscious wouldn't actually do enough but we'll see the results regardless.

Nothing will ever solve the problem with ewaste anyways, there is no going about that. Electrical usage is hardly a significant issue in Bitcoin.

The private key is never transferred over the USB. The bootloader doesn't have any codes that would transfer the private key to the computer nor does it need to be exposed that way. The unsigned transaction is transferred through the USB and signed on the device. The private key is always stored within the device in a sanitized environment. As long as the device doesn't send the private key or the seed over the USB, it doesn't matter whatever data is sent to and from the device.

Technically, you just have to practice proper coin control and avoid spending the funds from both the addresses at the same time. I understand that this is quite difficult so, that is not really an option.

Using passphrase will give you an entirely different set of address, so long as you keep the transactions separate, ie. not sending the funds to addresses between the sets of addresses, it is fine. However, passphrase isn't covered by the seed's checksum nor is there any fixed word list. If you lose the passphrase, there is no way to bruteforce it unless the passphrase is sufficiently weak.

Hardware wallet is not a cold storage. If you want, using Electrum with a cleanly wiped offline computer and having a watch-only wallet of that would make for a sufficiently secure airgapped cold storage.

A compromise. No one wants to shut down a country for an extended period of time, or when the pandemic ends. If your region is facing some really bad infection rates and hasn't reached herd immunity, then shutting them down is a no-brainer.

@eddie13, no one will know the reason why. In practice, a vaccinated individual poses far less risks than a non-vaccinated one. Interesting to note that though you are fully vaccinated, there still runs a risk of you contracting Covid, albeit probably asymptomatic. I suggest for you to clarify with your hospital about this, there are loads different factors involved and it would be far better for you to get some clarifications from the hospital than from the community here. You're just going to get people trying to spread unscientific misinformation or speculating around here.

Elon Musk withdrawing his support for Bitcoin after he supposedly found out that Bitcoin isn't clean is in a sense an external influence. Problem here is that he shouldn't be unaware of the environmental impacts of mining in the first place. Being critical of Bitcoin after he openly invested a billion dollars is questionable, either he is outright ignorant or has a certain agenda.
 

You can't. Majority of the miners are not included in the set of miners that were supposedly included. Miners will use renewable energy if it makes sense; namely lower costs or being located in a suitable geographical location. Having less than 20% of the miners openly state that they're only using renewable energy is hardly helping, media will still perceive it as a frivolous use of electricity that could otherwise be used for other more productive purposes.

Derived carbon footprint from the electrical usage is not the only environmental impact Bitcoin mining has. Not sure why everyone is putting so much emphasis on that.

First of all, Bitcoin should not be influenced by an external party. Users should be able to choose what kind of Bitcoin that they want without having something else forced down their throats.

Bitcoin probably won't accept anything else other than PoW, the community won't take it neither will majority of the other miners. If you're talking about renewable energy, sure! Most miners can already switch to them if the tariffs are cheaper. There should never be anything that governs the miners; it basically does nothing as there is no repercussions from breaking any rules and there is a risk of centralization as well. Forming an organization like this can threaten and restrict how the miners operates, which is not great.

Like it or not, this is just Elon Musk trying to save his investments and avoid a bad financial report.

If Bitcoin only becomes popular because some popular personality tweets or endorse it, then Bitcoin is useless. Bitcoin's value should come from its features and possibly adoption. Anyone that is able to manipulate the market like Elon Musk is terrible for the growth of Bitcoin; Bitcoin should not be a speculative asset whose value is dependent on others. Its value should come from its viability of day-to-day transactions and not from the fact that people believe that it is a good investment.

Having people like Elon Musk interfering with Bitcoin's market forces as he wishes is not good for Bitcoin, unless you're investing in Bitcoin specifically to get rich in fiat.

Bitmain is a privately held company with zero affiliation to Jack Ma's Ant Group. There is no correlation between the two companies other than the fact that their names sounds similar...

Ant group's total assets is estimated to be about 42 billion, China's GDP is 14 trillion. Your math might be quite a few magnitudes off. Bitmain's market share is rapidly decreasing throughout the years as competitors are introducing better and more efficient ASICs.

32 pairs of dice rolls provides 165bits of entropy, OK fair enough. That assumes the user throws the dice in a manner that negates any possible bias from the design of the dice or the way the user selects the number of throws it.

Most of the desktop wallets either sources the entropy from dev/urandom or OpenSSL. There is no pre-determined seeds from either of those sources as it gathers entropy on the go. If you do not trust the entropy generated by your kernel, then you shouldn't trust the device that you're using.

Design of most exchange is such that they hold custody of your Bitcoins when you purchase and the ownership is only transferred to you when you're withdrawing from the exchange. There is no way for you to get Bitcoins on-chain without having the exchange initiate an on-chain transaction directly.

Off-chain transactions, specifically those in exchanges are tracked by the exchange themselves and is thus independent of the state on the actual blockchain; in essence, when you're purchasing Bitcoins on Binance, your account balance increases and is tracked through Binance only and nothing changes on Blockchain. It is by no means guaranteed and it is only in your custody if you decide to withdraw it.

Depends on the kind of wallet you're using. If it is Electrum, then it is as good as using a blockexplorer. If your wallet has privacy preserving features, downloading selected blocks, using bloom filter at the very least (effectiveness disputed) or when dandelion gets implemented, wallets using it.

A better way to remove possible links is to use Tor and use a different identity for each query. This way, it is far more difficult for the blockexplorer to get your actual IPs and to link addresses together.

Pruned nodes are not as useful, you simply cannot query all of the transactions and having a UTXO set is arguably not very useful as well; you can't get any details out of that. You'll have to enable txindex before using some sort of blockexplorer on top of it.

You have to realize that good quality and objective journalism is basically non existent in this day and age. They would do anything to sensationalize them, even if it means that they're providing baseless and inaccurate information.

People are more than willing to consume them and support the rhethoric. When someone like Elon Musk says that Bitcoin isn't environmentally friendly, people tend to just listen to him and not do any research.

That, and people just loves to spread FUD and fake news. It's quite common.

Taint has a very broad definition and is almost always not uniformly enforced. There is zero grounds on suspending users, refusing services just because they were once mixed with "tainted" coins. It is just something that governments attempts to justify to curb the usage of Bitcoin on exchanges. The rationale behind rejecting "tainted" coins does not always hold true. CoinJoin will almost introduce some taint and even if they don't, it is obvious that it is a CoinJoin transaction and certain exchanges will block them anyways.

That being said, sooner or later, all of your Bitcoins will have some degree of taint. Should services start censoring that and lose loads of potential customers? If your exchange or your services are actively censoring your transactions, then you should certainly avoid that exchange/service in the first place, for reasons other than them not accepting tainted coins (intruding on your privacy by actively tracking your transactions).

I think the first question is quite well answered. I'll skip that.

Governments can already impose whatever kinds of restrictions that they want to on exchanges, nothing is stopping them. However, this entails that most of the trading activities becomes unregulated. This makes it difficult for governments to enforce KYC/AML to track their citizens, it would be far better to create legalized exchanges to at least ensure that they're able to get some information from it. There is really no incentives to ban Bitcoin, Bitcoin is just about the furthest threat to fiat and I don't see it being poised to take over fiat anytime in the future.
As long as there's a wide userbase and that people are willing to peg a value to it, then it'll be a store of value. It's legality is of course in question in certain areas.

I've been using Bitcoin for quite a few of my payments for servers, Bitrefill, etc. LN has more unrealized potential and it depends on the willingness of adoption for it. Bitcoin has more projects which enhances the capability of it and it is fairly convenient as a store of value as well.

It is extremely myopic to be assuming that the market only has the capacity to accommodate for one coin. Just because you think something else is better in certain way doesn't mean the other coins has to be eliminated; there isn't any point for that and wouldn't encourage any innovation. Thinking Bitcoin is kept alive solely by some very rich people is baseless, I think you're thinking about DogeCoin instead. Most countries have been making policies tailored to crush Bitcoin and it has survived them pretty well .