There are alternative options, although they will take a bit of time and effort in order to set up and use.

The easiest way to stay synced with the network without an internet connection is via Blockstream Satellite. It is possible to repurpose any old satellite dish in order to do this.

In order to broadcast a transaction, you need to get it to someone with an internet connection. This might be someone who has bypassed government restrictions, or maybe someone who lives near a border and can use the connection of another country, or someone outside your country altogether. You can get it to them via a mesh network such as goTenna, via SMS, via radio, or any other way you like.

This is not the problem of bitcoin, but the problem with your government that disabled internet in your country. You can use Starlink instead of relying on local service providers.

1. Oh yeah. This seed can be used to derive your private key. It is not the actual private key, but if you have access to the seed, then it is essentially the same thing.

Don't worry about merit! I am happy to help.

1. Unfortunately I don't use electrum, so I don't really know what password you are referring to. Normally, most modern wallets support BIP-39 which is an improvement that allows you to memorize and back-up (always offline) 12 - 24 english words from a list of 2048 words. Those 12 - 24 words can help you recover your private key. Please check here: https://learnmeabitcoin.com/technical/mnemonic. Some applications also allow you to use a password, but this not related to bitcoin protocol. It is application specific as an extra measure of safety. If you forget your password, you don't have to worry as you can enter your 12-24 words to another software and have access to all of your funds. If you lose and forget your 12-24 words, you lose everything.

2. What do you mean public addresses? They can be shared without risk, if this is your question.

Extra note: Since I understand that this is your first contact with Bitcoin, make sure to be ultra safe when backing up your wallet. Don't share anything with anyone unless you are absolutely sure.

The coins are "stored" in the blockchain.
Electrum holds the keys that can "unlock" your ability to spend bitcoin you have received.
Electrum (and every other wallet) DON'T store coins. They only store keys. That's a common misconception.

In order to "receive" coins, you need NOTHING at all. Just give someone an address.

You need Internet in order to:
1. Monitor your incoming transactions and perhaps get notifications about them.
2. Broadcast transactions a.k.a "send coins"

You don't need Internet to:
1. Receive coins
2. Sign transactions (assuming you will broadcast them later)
3. Create new wallets aka new pairs of keys

I hope I have answered your question. You don't need Internet to receive bitcoin. Coins are stored nowhere. That's not how it works. If someone wants to send you coins, they have to broadcast a transaction and let people (other nodes and miners) know that they have sent the coins. Once you open up electrum you need Internet to "see that you have received the coins".

Fees are necessary!
Imagine how the mempool would look right now if we didn't have fees!


There is no such thing, a miner will do the same amount of work for an empty block and a full block, there is this misconception with the transactions numbers or size or fees require something extra from the miners when it's not the case. Also, it's a bit silly, what "extra" work would miners have to do for this and how would they even do it?


To prevent spam.
If it weren't for fees you could split one bitcoin into 100 000 outputs with zero fees and then consolidate and split again occupying all the blocks that day without paying a cent, rendering the network useless, with a fee it will always cost the attacker a ton of coins to do so and you could always outbid him if it's something urgent while he must do this continuously.
Later on, it will be of use to incentivize miners to keep mining as fees grow in % vs the reward but we're not there yet in normal low fee times.

As the mempool was very congested yesterday, I was still able to use 17.5 sat/vbyte and my transaction got confirmed in approximately 10 minutes (not up to 10 minutes).

We can see the mempool becoming less congested. It is at 24 sat/vbytes now.

Mining difficulty will also soon be adjusted.

After I learned about the MASS token that offers PoC creating an energy efficient consensus layer, I became interested in creating MASS as a mining alternative. Because it only requires a storage device to start mining, making MASS more profitable. And I'm sure I can get good returns from MASS tokens, especially seeing the performance of MASS start to improve.