Not even hard. 1Musk has a difficulty of 4553521 on vanitysearch. I've generated about 11 in the span of 3 seconds. In addition, 1ELonMusk takes roughly a day or two on my single 1080TI.
It can definitely be done by an indivdiual. Processing power has gotten so much faster, that wiki is obviously outdated.

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I'm not really sure how people think Elon Musk needs donation. Probably the same way as a Nigerian Prince scam.

Well, you wouldn't ever know until it happens. It's safe to assume QC is the biggest threat to cryptography, anything else would be a speculation at this point. QCs, together with Shor algorithm will probably be the one that can feasibly factorize large integers.
It is. Until we figure out a way to secure the millions of Bitcoins that are associated with the exposed public keys. I'll leave the feasibility and its cost aside, it isn't the main point of the topic.

Nodes can still see your IP address. They just cannot ascertain if the transaction that you have broadcasted to them belongs to you or if you're merely someone who received and relay the transaction. As to why it provides more privacy than traditional SPV client, they don't send any addresses (bloom filter or not) to other nodes. It does not mean that it will enhance your privacy; it will depend on your spending habits. SPV clients like Wasabi will provide more all-around privacy.
I'm inclined to think that they're implying that you will be able to see the blocks but you won't be able to modify anything within that which would affect any other nodes as you won't have sufficient POW to build a new block, etc.
Not true. Bitcoin Core uses fairly low resources (in terms of CPU). I'm able to run my full node while gaming or video encoding as well. It really doesn't use that much resources after the initial block download, receiving and validating new blocks would at most result in a small spike in CPU usage.

I actually haven't thought of this at all and I was more fixated on how it would just exploit public key cryptography. I don't think QCs will be able to speed up the generation of seeds (or addresses), that significantly. After all, address generation involves both SHA256 as well as RIPEMD-160 while HMAC-SHA512 is used for BIP32 seeds to master private keys. While they should provide a speedup through Grover's algorithm, I doubt it would be fast enough to exhaust the key space. But of course, the xpub will be vulnerable to quantum computers the same way as how exposed public keys are.

The IP address appears to belong to whatismyip.com in the past and the code just sends a request to them to get the external IP of which the request is coming from. Seems like its just used to determine the external IP of the node? IRC was used initially for them to find peers, AFAIK.

Antiviruses are not impenetrable. It's entirely possible that it was a well designed malware. Did anyone else have physical access to your computer besides you?
Yes.

You should backup important files and wipe your computer first. You can install Bitcoin Core again to import the compromised wallet.dat for the sole purpose of withdrawing the funds that has yet to be sent. If the attackers are any smarter, they probably would be faster than you and use a script to monitor the addresses.

As well as transactions that were in P2PK, which means most of the coins mined in the early days are vulnerable. It is not difficult to solve this issue for the transactions in the future but those with exposed public keys will inevitably be vulnerable still.

Important note: Most of the encryptions that you're using nowadays will be broken in tandem. Whether Bitcoin is a suitable target, it's too early to tell.

Are you talking about the reused r values in the signature? That was fixed by wallets adopting deterministic signature generation which results in the r values being unique for each signature, aka. RFC 6979. If it's not, could you point me to some information regarding this?

Correct. If you want a quick reference, here's the data from my node: http://163.172.57.208/getmempoolinfo.txt.

Correct. My node's minfee sets it at roughly 5sat/vbyte.

You'll probably have to create a new transaction spending at least 5sat/vbyte for it to be relayed by the nodes.

Segwit doesn't reduce transaction data, the segwit transactions could actually still be bigger than legacy transactions under some circumstances. Segwit is essentially just a block size increase.

It was quite obvious from the onstart that Bitcoin wasn't going to scale, bandwidth-wise. There wasn't any block limits initially until quite a bit after it was released. Bandwidth was a far greater concern then and it was obvious that it wasn't going to scale at that time. Lightning network is not the panacea to the problem. You still have to make on-chain transactions to open and close channels. Perhaps it could alleviate the problem but onchain capacity will remain an issue.

Disconnecting it suddenly would be akin to an unclean shutdown which can cause database corruption. It'll be fine unless the disconnection happens while Bitcoin Core is writing data into the disk.

The script itself is secure enough and provides sufficient randomness from any bruteforcing attack and that is the main point of the topic. I think we have to eliminate any malicious party that could intentionally modify the entropy sources to make it less random... Running a phishing site with a pre-defined seed is sufficient for this. Malicious add-ons and stuff like that shouldn't matter because the webpage isn't designed to run on a compromised computer.

As for the randomness, I've done a quick pass over their entropy collection[1]. I think the way the entropy is generated is sufficiently random, barring any possible interference externally.

[1] https://github.com/pointbiz/bitaddress.org/blob/72aefc03e0d150c52780294927d95262b711f602/src/securerandom.js

If you want to upgrade to 4.0.1 and above, then you'll have to upgrade both instances. The raw transaction is no longer backwards compatible after they changed the format. [1]

[1] https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/blob/ae15bccb8192532afc4908b43f68797cd6239fd6/RELEASE-NOTES#L123

Shut down Bitcoin Core then move the entire data directory elsewhere.

Afterwards, run Bitcoin with -choosedatadir and select the folder which contains all the contents that you've moved. You'll have to either run it with command prompt, ie:
.

Or create a shortcut of Bitcoin Core, right click on it to properties and append -choosedatadir at the end of the target.

It doesn't hurt to try to run something like Recuva to see if there are any files that aren't fully overwritten. I would probably prefer it to be mounted externally so nothing gets written on it any further. I have doubts that you'll get anything. Chances are it'll be overwritten if it has been formatted and used.

Pywallet will work as well.

So I assume that somehow the GPU is more efficient than the heater at lower temperatures? If that is somehow the case, then it'll make more sense. The heater must be pretty bad given such a huge disparity can be offset by another supposedly less efficient device.

I'm 100% certain the miner isn't mining Bitcoin. I've seen quite a few of them mining using old Antminers though.

Not sure how the comparison makes sense at all. If anything you wouldn't take the energy used to mine that amount of Bitcoins but you would take the energy that is used to mine the block that the specific transaction is included in. The Bitcoins are mined regardless and the carbon footprint is distributed on those who happens to use those UTXOs so it makes little sense to count the energy used to mine it. Tesla is a tech company that ventures into EV but their primary concern is not to tackle climate change; else they would stop producing luxury cars and instead focus on vehicles which can accommodate much more people/sqft. Doesn't help that some countries are using non-renewable sources which would just exacerbate the problem as they're thinking it's good for the environment but it is not in actuality.

Not really that big of an issue. Bitcoin mining is most profitable if the miners are able to siphon off the excess energy that energy companies produces. It's no secret that most of them are situated near power plants which produces clean energy so the environmental impact is probably blown out of proportion.

How would preheating the air to a heat pump reduce the electricity bills? GPUs are not very efficient at energy output as they are primarily designed for other purposes and a significant amount of energy are not wasted as heat. I don't doubt the mining profits covering parts of his bills but I can't seem to wrap my head around that point.

Anyhow, yeah nothing new. I've seen a few members using it for solomining during winter and someone rigging a huge radiator for it.

Miners will always flock to places with lower operation cost to maximize their profit margin. There is really no telling as to which country will dominate Bitcoin mining in the future. If certain countries subsidize it for some reason, then people would just flock there.

Honestly, China probably wouldn't bother about Bitcoin mining. Bitcoin is already restrictive enough in the country. Trying to drive out the miners would result them losing potential revenue in multiple levels, from the profits to the capital gains and to the ASIC producers. The benefit of the operations outweigh the cons by far. If China wants to launch their own coin, they wouldn't have any problems with adoption within the country and the western countries wouldn't even think about using it. Trying to drive out the miners to weaken Bitcoin doesn't do anything beneficial for them.

Anyhow, centralization is probably a problem but not anywhere near the more pressing ones that we currently have.