We've had enough red this past year that it is time for seeing some green candles now. Although we don't yet have the momentum but the potential is still there. Not to mention that every day when the market manipulators fail to push the price down despite their dumps, is a day where the buy support gets stronger

This is the whole point I've been making in this thread. Also keep in mind that the US dependence on others is not just their markets as export destinations, but also US depends on their resources to manufacture stuff they want to export.
For example we saw the significance of this in the sanction war between US and China where US started restricting export of chips to China and China started restricting export of materials used in manufacturing Chips to all those countries!

Yes, it is like mainnet. You don't need to store the whole blockchain, all you need is the chainstate (ie. the UTXO database) so you can prune the chain. But you still need to download and verify all blocks to build the chainstate before you can discard the old ones in the process called pruning.

Go to the main page of the repository on Github and click the green button on top saying Code and then select the Download ZIP option to get a full copy of the repository. Then inside it you will find the html file called index.html that should be enough to run this and although I haven't tested it considering it is an html file it should run on mobile too.

BTW smart phones can never be considered "truly offline".

Your question is too vague., it depends on what you mean by "use" and "public node".

Nodes aren't categorized as "public" and "private". They either accept incoming connection or not.
As for connection/usage, if you mean something like connecting to a single node and syncing that way, it is not only a privacy risk but also a security risk since that node may be either broken or malicious and end up feeding you false data. This is why SPV clients usually connect to multiple full nodes for syncing.

In any case you should clarify your question for a more detailed answer.

There is a huge assumption in your post. You are assuming that the F-16s that Ukraine is supposed to receive are the improved versions. However, from what I can tell this assumption may not be correct since what is being sent is the old versions with little to no improvement.

For example two of the batches that Ukraine may receive in the future are coming from Denmark and Netherlands. Both of these countries have purchased majority of their F-16s in the early 80's and some small numbers in the 90's; meaning most of what they are going to send to Ukraine is the old versions (A and B variants).

As for the lifespan, these old aircrafts have only gone through certain small upgrades for example one of them is what Lockheed-Martin refers to as the "MLU package" which Denmark paid for and only performs routine tests for fatigue, cracks, etc. and fixes some to increase the lifespan. It is like taking your 50 year old car to the shop to increase its lifespan for another decade!

As for the missiles, the only missiles that these countries have purchased (like the ones that RDAF owns) are medium range like the air-to-air missiles such as AM-110 that has a range of 30 miles (48 km), the air-to-ground missiles such as AGM-65 that has a range of 0.6-10 miles (1-16 km).

I couldn't find any reliable information about the radars installed in these aircrafts so I can't comment on that. But considering the rest, specifically the short range of their missiles, I wouldn't count on it to be anything "modern".

Just because some news has the word "Apple" or "iPhone" in it, doesn't mean it is on topic! Did you even bother reading the opening post or the ongoing discussion in this topic?
We aren't discussing iPhone 15 sale stats or speculating about Apple revenues here! At least read the article from BusinessInsider that I shared before spamming with irrelevant stuff...

In a "Fork War" in bitcoin which uses the Proof of Work algorithm, you'd need to have hashrate (mining power), full nodes and the community to follow you. Having a bunch of money and bitcoin is not going to really help in this decentralized network. It might have if bitcoin were using a shitty algorithm like PoS though

Even targeting exchanges won't work because it is not 2011 anymore where 85-90% of the trading volume is in one exchange in one country to be able to have a significant impact on the whole market to have any influence using the price. Today the trading volume of different exchanges is low and mostly below 5 to 10% of the total volume and many of them are not even inside US for Blackrock to have any way of pulling anything like what you speculate.
Besides, market manipulation which is the only thing they can do, is not going to really affect any "fork war" that may or may not happen.

You should read the previous comments, specifically by @BlackHatCoiner. This had nothing to do with internet connection, data processing, orphan blocks, "misunderstanding between nodes", etc. And it definitely has nothing to do with being decentralized since the system is working beyond fine. In fact the reason why invalid blocks like this don't create any issue is because of decentralization.

This was simply an invalid block created a miner running a customized and buggy code.

The reason for things like this happening stems from incompetence developers who do not have a deep understanding of the Bitcoin protocol and its details such as the one leading to this mistake in the customized code the miner was using to create the block they mined.
We see incompetence like this from time to time too. For example a while ago we saw blocks that had too big an OP count that surpassed the allowed number and made the block invalid. Another detail that the developer who wrote the code for that miner didn't know!

This is the guaranteed way of losing money not a trading strategy.
For starters the real traders do no share their trades with others. There is simply no reason or incentive to do so. Anybody who does, is a scammer and their incentive to share their so called strategies is somewhere else, for example a pumper who wants to artificially pump a shitcoin they are bag holding would tell others to buy that shitcoin so that they can make profit.

Besides, even in best case scenario if you could find what the expert is buying you still wouldn't be able to do in different scenarios. For example an expert may buy a shitcoin but they know when to dump it and they will act quickly. But since you have no clue what to do, you will end up bag holding and lose money.

Witness is not "separated" at all, it is still part of the transaction and like any other field (like version, locktime, etc.) it is stored and transferred as part of the transaction.

Max block size hasn't been 1 MB ever since the SegWit soft fork in 2017.

The main problem is the methods you use which can make things complicated and possibly lead to problems when you want to recover your mnemonic from the complicated backup.
For example you said "encrypt the other 12 words", what algorithm are you going to use? AES? Will you use a KDF like BIP38 to derive the password used in AES? Will you use it correctly and will it be reproducible? Will you remember how you did it so that you can recover your mnemonic in the future?
You see when you come up with your own algorithm, unlike BIP38 I mentioned, it won't be standardized so a lot of details about it could be weak, buggy or not-reproducible.

It depends on the wallet software you use. Some of them have the option to lock addresses or lock outputs (coins) manually. For example in Electrum there is the option to "freeze" addresses so that you can no longer spend from them even if you don't have enough funds in your other unfrozen addresses.

Good examples but there is a fundamental difference here. In case of all these companies we are seeing pure competition and they all continue existing side by side offering their products in a tight competing market. For example in a phone shop you see Apple, Samsung, Nokia, ... all there and you choose between them. That competition is a good thing since it forces all of these companies to keep improving and keep their product prices low.

In case of US, it was not the competition that got US to the "number 1" position in different fields. Instead it was destruction of others, some of which caused directly by US. For example the biggest help to US was World War 2 which only had one winner and it was US because US mainland was completely intact while everywhere else from Europe and Russia to Africa and Asia were destroyed. This is also what shaped the US general policy over the past 80+ years, a "grease the pol behind you" kind of policy.
This also clarifies why US sees any country that improves as a "national security threat"! Because if for example Africa regains its independence and strength, West Asia gets rid of US backed terrorists, etc. that means they will all kick the colonizers out which means all the resources US has been stealing all these years to build that "empire" will no longer be accessible to the regime for free.

You should personally review the code you find by searching otherwise it may contain bugs specially in less popular projects. Otherwise stick to popular code like like Iancoleman source code or look at the BIP page itself, they almost always have a couple of "reference implementations" listed there that are more reliable than something you can find through quick search. Link to BIP-85 page (the second link you posted can also be found here).

If you want to check if an address belongs to your wallet in Electrum, it is so much easier to just use the "hidden" search box in the Addresses tab from the UI, since it is more user friendly. All you have to do is to press Ctrl+F buttons on your keyword for it to appear.

Considering that "what month it is" has little to no effects on bitcoin market I have to say that we can't predict the price like this. However, this month we have the increasing energy price and as we get close to another Hard Winter, for the second year we are going to see increased inflation and I don't think the increasing interest rates policy can help anymore which means this time the inflation won't be accompanied by recession and as a result bitcoin price can finally start going up.

As you can see, it is a big chain of events that is affecting bitcoin market, not just the month we're in and what happened in the past!

Since BIP-85 is not popular and what you want to use it for is not used by others, the "script" you are looking for probably doesn't exist either. You should write it yourself by using the existing code in Iancoleman repository for instance.

Bitcoin is already fixing a lot of that by design. You see the reason why most of these scam methods like using card skimming devices, cloning your card, stealing your pin, etc. happen is because there is a middle man between the user (aka the owner of the funds) and the holder of the funds (ie. the bank). So the scammer comes in between as another middle man and takes the secret information during the communication between the user and the bank.

In bitcoin the owner of the funds and the holder of the funds (and keys) are the same. There is no middle man involved so nobody can use any of these methods to steal your secrets.

Then make a job! You don't have to become an employee, you can become an employer yourself. Of course it depends on your degree and your ambitions and how willing you are on taking on challenges and enduring hardship. For example do you think any of these big companies with thousands of employees (like Microsoft, Apple, etc.) were created out of thin air overnight? It took years of dedication and hard work to build the company to what it is today.

There is no reason for you not to be able to do something similar even on a tiny scale.
In fact if what you claimed was right, that means there is going to be little to no competition.