Probably won't help much, if at all. There isn't any proprietary secure elements being produced by any hardware wallet manufacturers. Designing one and manufacturing them would probably make the cost of one skyrocket, not to mention that smashing that many components into a single chip isn't common at all.

Communication between secure element and the MCU should be encrypted and if anything were to be extracted. AFAIK, some MCUs actually wipe their memory on bootup, even if the user doesn't do a clean shutdown. Would be better to just use a SE that allows for transactions to be signed within that, so keys are never sent out of it.

Go read the whitepaper. The references are in it, together with the links. It'll be good to see the early Satoshi emails as well, they can give you some insights into his thought process.

The purpose of Bitcoin is to provide an environment that eliminates any third party interference. It does not mean that you cannot exchange it for another store of value that involves a third party; there is simply no way to stop that.
It will. There are however technical concerns and political oppositions within the Bitcoin community. Some altcoins like Ethereum has block intervals that are a couple of seconds. In its current state, it is not always desirable or convenient for day to day transactions. Which is where Lightning network attempts to solve, albeit with limited effects.

You can see the block size debate and take the position for yourself.
I agree.

If you want to stop mining, then you have to eliminate Bitcoin's PoW first by changing it into something like a PoS. Mining will never stop in Bitcoin's case. The primary aim of Bitcoin is not to make everyone rich by artificially cutting the supply or otherwise manipulating it. It is designed to be a currency with a pre-determined coin cap.

Yes, Bitcoin's utility would be better if it could be confirmed quicker. Completely possible and feasible, the question is if everyone would agree on it. If not, then it'll become another altcoin.

Perhaps. It could've had a domino effect for all you know.

The energy that is wasted cannot possibly be sufficient to be able to outweigh the amount of electricity used by Bitcoin mining. You can also store excess energy in batteries or converting it back into GPE through a pump in the case of dams. Not too sure about the efficiency of long distance electricity transmission nowadays but it could've resulted in less fossil fuels burned elsewhere as well.

It is certainly not a natural disaster, nature doesn't consume electricity.
Its estimated to consume 0.5%. Environmental pollution, no matter how small is still considered pollution. All of the examples that you've listed are also culprits of carbon footprint but so is Bitcoin mining. Mining and processing silicon and the production of ASICs may not always be carbon neutral. There are bound to be people who both practice what they preach and advocate for their cause as well, can you really fault them?

If the benefit that arises from using Bitcoin with a higher transaction volume and adoption grows, then I would think there'll be less noise. Most of the commotion is almost always generated by the media.

Hal Finney Satoshi wasn't the first to invent a PoW algorithm, Hal Finney did.

BitGold and B-Money were apparently referenced in the whitepaper as well. If you were to look into both of them, you can find some similarities to how Bitcoin actually function.

Very well thought out and I didn't have much to counter as well.

You're comparing Bitcoin to its substitutes instead of the various other human activities which could produce significant carbon footprint. Heck, I can think of tons of activities that directly contribute to an increased carbon footprint; transportation, chemical industries, etc. Does that mean that we can just stop producing metals, refining fossil fuels, completely eliminate them from our lives? Probably not.

In comparison, when you're talking about Bitcoin, the adoption currently is far lower than most of it's substitutes. At 7tps, there are tons of other payment methods that easily outpaces this by a factor of thousands without a strain on their network. Can people stop using Bitcoin? Probably, there are other payment methods because really, do the majority of the people absolutely care about decentralization, transparency? I can see an argument for this if your transaction volume rivals them but if the benefits are still fairly limited, then probably not.

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What about the e-waste that is constantly generated from Bitcoin mining? The competition makes it such that old ASICs are always phased out once the profit margin diminishes and as ASICs can never be reprogrammed into something else, they usually end up being useless afterwards. Of course, they're always turned on 24/7 with the chips pushed to their limits and the failure rates can be higher than most electronics. Surely both the production and disposal of these ASICs are fairly detrimental to the environment? You can't recycle silicon, or that's what I know.

I'm a strong proponent that Bitcoin's electrical usage, while fairly significant doesn't pose as a serious problem. I can't see how e-waste wouldn't be an issue, as we're talking about environmental impact after all.

Yeah, you'll have to certify it somehow. Not a problem though.
Unless the PGP key has been compromised, which is quite unlikely, you can trust that this was signed by ThomasV. The fingerprint that I've imported matches yours, 6694 D8DE 7BE8 EE56 31BE  D950 2BD5 824B 7F94 70E6. If you trust that the public key is accurate, then you've downloaded the legit version.

I'll probably just skip the exchange.

Converting your Bitcoins to altcoins is usually done through an intermediary, usually an exchange which has to collect data for KYC/AML purposes. Even if you use Monero, you'll still have to convert it to Bitcoin at some point which would be through an exchange.

Instead, I'll use a P2P method (slightly more risky but way more privacy) and skip the whole exchange part. Just use a mixer or CoinJoin to break/obfuscate the link and you'll be better.

No. Taproot is a new format and this entails that users have to move their funds to a new address, if they want to take advantage of it. The transactions are smaller when it's a multisig (n-of-m) but in terms of size, it won't benefit others that significantly. The assumption is that by optimizing them, the size per transaction goes down and thus other transaction types can pay less fees and fit into a block. Since you have to first transfer it into another TR address, I doubt it'll help much.

Also, Multisig transactions shouldn't form a significant portion of the network.

The scheme that they described is implemented on the hardware itself; the hardware is designed such that it only signs transactions that spends to specific addresses. It is totally possible to do something like this, just that as long as you are able to extract the private keys, you will still be able to make a valid transaction and spend it.

Something like this is easily bypassed, as mentioned with the private keys/seeds. We're more concerned about making it impossible to spend funds to other address, which would be marginally more useful though probably not necessary. I don't see the need for something like this as it'll just complicate the entire process even more, if the addresses that the hardware was coded to send to were also compromised.

Yes. You can fork Bitcoin Core to increase the block subsidy logic or it's block intervals. It is never really set in stone; any changes to the consensus rules which is incompatible with other clients results in a hard fork. This means that someone can create a new Bitcoin with a larger block rewards. If you're going to generate a block with a larger block reward, it won't be accepted by the nodes running this current version of Bitcoin and thus both chain inevitably deviates.

Sure did.

Even if Schnorr and Taproot, that would be fairly far in the future. Activation logic hasn't even been integrated yet.

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I don't expect 1sat/vbyte to be viable in the near future. Electrum does automatically rebroadcast transactions if it isn't included in the server and if it doesn't violate the min fee (someone please CMIIW). Just creating a transaction with a fee that you're willing to pay would be sufficient. Don't worry about mempool min fee, if your transaction can't meet that criteria, it would almost certainly not get confirmed anytime soon anyways; there's 100vMB worth of transaction before you.

Press on your wallet name on the top left. You should be directed to a page which says master public key and the other is the seeds which is censored.

Unfortunately I didn't really make a graph of minmempool fees but from my experience, the minimum fees tends to fluctuate at about 5 to 6 sat/vbyte.

The lowest transaction which I have confirmed so far is about 8sat/vbyte. On weekends, I use 10sat/vbyte for a fairly high probability. Would it be better to use mempool.space and see if you can find a suitable compromise?

** I don't exactly recommend people to switch servers for the sole purpose of getting lower transactions broadcasted. Reason being, even if you're able to push the TX through, it doesn't guarantee good propagation.

The signature isn't verified, OP has imported the public key before. It should still show the RSA key without knowledge of the PGP key, instead of a signature mismatch.

As said, changing the file extension to something other than .asc can make it unusable for validation. Make sure that the file name of your .asc matches your .dmg as well.

It's not about modifying the block. The sole reason why this doesn't work is due to the fact that the Bitcoin nodes enforces the rules individually. Any deviation from the rules will not be accepted, even if the block is valid for the most part. Modifying any block would make it invalid regardless.

Anyone can crack the code. Just modify the block interval or the block rewards and you'll be able to increase the max supply. Problem is, due to your different block intervals (and as a result of the difficulty) and/or your different block rewards, you'll either reject the blocks generated by the network sooner or later. Effectively, you're forking Bitcoin. As a result, you're running a different Bitcoin with different rules that no one follow excepts you.

If you persuade everyone to follow your fork and replace the current Bitcoin, the effectively max cap would be raised. If no one wants to follow, nothing happens for everyone else.

It is enough. Tails doesn't save any data within the USB that lasts beyond a reboot. This means that if you don't save the seeds, your Electrum will be gone without the seeds. Enabing persistence will allow you to use Electrum across reboots without having to restore everytime.

I don't think Bitcoin Core implemented either of the BIP? Or I can't find any of sign of the two being implemented.

Yes, it's possible to sign a message with the private key but you cannot refer to the bech32 address directly in doing so; exporting key-> sign message. You have to access the console to call signmessagewithprivkey and use your private key to do so.