The coin selection in Electrum is both deterministic and random but with some conditions.
You have to look at the source code for the details but generally speaking Electrum creates "buckets" from your UTXOs from each address and tries to deterministically choose a "bucket" that can produce the best transaction that has the amount you want to pay and produces less blockchain bloat.

LOL majority of resources are now in the hands of BRICS countries. In energy alone, now 80% belongs to BRICS countries, if you think that's "poor people's club" then review the 70's and how the crazy Arabs sanctioned the West and burnt Europe's economy to the ground.

That's the same exact thing! How do you think US sanctions other countries, with sticks and stones?

In the Old World Order where countries used to use US dollar for all their trades, when US wanted to sanction a country they simply stole all their dollars by blocking them in the SWIFT system and in their banks. In the New World Order where dollar is used less and less every day, US has decreasing capability to sanction others and is only isolating itself.

There is a difference between difficulty and the target.
Difficulty is only used when we want to represent "how hard" it is to mine a block. Current difficulty is found here: https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/ and is calculated as explained here: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty
Target on the other hand is the actual value used in mining to determine the suitable header hash and is explained here: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Target
It's value is found in each block's header in a short 32-bit form that can be converted to the long 256-bit form.

On average it depends on the hashrate of your device which is the number of hashes it can compute per second.
Current estimated total network hashrate is 387 EHS which is 387*10^18 hashes per second.

It is unlikely that active traders (that are actively making profit based on market reactions to different news) withdraw their bitcoins from the exchanges this quickly and at a time like this. To put simply, the market is now getting exciting and active for traders to make profit from, they are not going to pull their funds out the exchanges and miss out on all the opportunities of making profit.

Apart from that, transactions like this to addresses similar to this are not as uncommon as you'd think. Specially since this looks more like a service like an exchange wallet working with such large amounts as 5k-6k bitcoins in each transaction.

It is interesting to see there are still irrational traders (also known as weak hands) making emotional decisions. Starting with the irrational drop below $30k and now with the recent rise back up as panic buyers are most probably reacting to this news over the past day forming another big green candle.
The only important question is whether this is going to turn into a positive momentum?

My perspective hasn't really changed much, I still think the global economy is in too much of an uncertain way that is also seeping into the bitcoin market affecting how people react. We have seen how the growing recession in US and EU over the past year has put a sell pressure on the market causing the drop to this point and also preventing the start of the next bull cycle. This has not changed so far. So either the recession has to end (which is not going to happen since energy price is still high among other reasons) or "they" have to run out of bitcoins to sell which will take longer.

In short 2023 will continue being uncertain with sideways and sometimes unpredictable moves like the recent drop below $30k.

Some of these sound more like people who have heard correct statements but they are paraphrasing it so the correctness is somewhat lost. This is a common thing in technical matters.

For example take the second statement "bitcoin payments happen in seconds", a bitcoin transaction does propagate through the network in mere seconds so in a way the first part is correct since a transaction reaches the receiver in seconds; however, the confirmation takes time which is the part where it becomes finalized (or irreversible).

Or the third statement "bitcoin relies on middlemen to pass payments along a route" replace the phrase "middlemen" with "peers" and the term "along a route" with "to other peers" and it is a correct statement.

There is a difference between CoinJoin the protocol and the implementation of this protocol. We know the benefits of CoinJoin, we also know the danger of using the malicious implementation of CoinJoin called Wasabi that is in cahoots with anti-privacy organizations.

It's like ECDSA. We know the algorithm itself is safe however there were implementations that were broken and leaked the private key when user signed their transaction.

Decimals are only used in the User Interface to show the value to the user in different ways. Otherwise as far as the protocol and consensus rules are concerned there is no decimal values used anywhere. Every number in Bitcoin is an integer (a whole number) of different size, most are 32 bit (like version and locktime), some are variable size (like script lengths), we have a couple of 256 bit integers (used in difficulty) and the only 64 bit integers we have are the "amounts" field in the outputs of each transaction.

It's been a rough and long journey though. Reversing a downward spiral that lasted about 2 centuries is always expensive. We have a saying that they took a whale turned it into a pussycat (current map of Iran looks like a cat); that is the occupation/separation of 2.6 million km² from Iran between 1812 to 1970 starting from Caucasus to Iran's 14th province called Bahrain.
It took roughly 15 years from 1964 to 1979 to stop that downfall and start the reversal through a bloody revolution, then it took almost 5 decades in post revolution Iran to get to here with an 8 years of "hot" war (armed conflict) and 44 years of cold and hybrid war to get to here.

This is also another indication of the weakening United States. It is not just the POTUS who is a senile old man, he is the literal manifestation of a regime that used to be a superpower.

That is not possible, there will always be stronger countries and weaker countries. There simply can never be equality, just like in society. I don't think this has ever happened in history either.

But the good news is that unlike the past 32 years the world will no longer have a single super power that abuses that power. In the new World Order there multiple poles of power. It is also not just US versus Russia fighting for a bigger "piece of the cake". As you said there is also China that is growing and has become a super power. But that is not the end, there are more countries that have built a strong status for themselves.

Take India for example. That's basically a continent of its own with a large population and fast growing economy. India is also expected to basically replace China in terms of GDP growth rate in the following decade which is why United States also considers India a threat! lol

Another example would be Iran, a country with a battle hardened economy that despite having experienced high inflation for many years (due to the record number of sanctions) still had a bigger GDP growth (4.7%) compared to US (0.9) and EU (1. in the last quarter of 2022 according to the World Bank which is expected to reach 5.6% by the end of 2023. Add to that the biggest amount of energy (oil+gas+lithium), numerous industries (traditional and high tech), one of the most advanced militaries and literary the biggest military alliance spread across the globe and you got yourself another super power.

With organizations such as BRICS we are going to see more power poles show up. I'd say Brazil is the next candidate.

Nobody likes any of them. They have a bad history specially US and Russia with all their wars, invasions and genocides. Interestingly enough most of the world also feels the same way about the New World Order (multipolar world). In fact a couple of months ago I was reading what one of those thinktanks in Washington had published about their fears of dedollarisation and in there they argued that rules of majority of the countries in the world see the New World Order as an opportunity to become stronger. And today we are seeing that happening specially in Africa as more nations fight for liberation.

I don't think the risk of such investment is as high as you'd think. At the end of the day there are still cities and people and there are infrastructures they need. It doesn't matter who rules over those cities and people, they will still need the money to rebuild! Even if it is Russia that in the end takes control of those cities, they'll need foreign investors to rebuild anything they'd destroyed, which is where jackals like BlackRock come in to fill their own pockets.

Unfortunately Decentralized Finance is one of those cool ideas that the shitcoin called ethereum has taken over and have already ruined it. So for now it is associated with creating completely useless shittokens and scamming people using the shitplatform known as ethereum!!!
I don't see anything changing as long as token creating platforms aren't being developed seriously in a truly decentralized way.

BTW this is not the first over-hyped mechanism they've used to revive ETH price though. They keep changing the name of the scamming method and continue their ways: ICO, IDO, IBO, IEO, ITO, STO, DeFi, NFT are the existing ones, each deader than the other.

The only part of your post I disagree with is this.
Diversification in my books is when you buy "assets" that are not related to each other. Meaning if one dumped the others won't follow. We all know that this is not true about altcoins, each time bitcoin makes a move they get dumped. That makes them terrible for diversification.

Not putting all the eggs in one basket in my opinion should be investing in bitcoin then in things like gold, stocks, real estate, etc. that aren't linked to bitcoin or vice versa.

Referring to altcoins as "assets" makes no sense since at best they are a worse version of penny stocks which are garbage stocks from garbage companies 99% of which have no future whatsoever. Altcoins are the same, majority of them are absolutely useless and they are all created for pump and dumps which are risky to get involved in.

In any case, during the "bull cycles" if anyone wants to touch altcoins they should firs prepare themselves for the concept of pumps and dumps otherwise they will be dumped on and become bag-holders. It is of paramount importance to know when to sell altcoins and how to do it quickly.

This is why we always suggest newcomers to stick to bitcoin alone.

If we use the second method of creating the Taproot address (explained here) then no we can't know the public key that was used, we only see the "tweaked" public key.

In asymmetric cryptography the public key needs to be public! otherwise the algorithm is useless.

ChatGPT is not suitable to answer anything technical. A simple Google search would give you better results in most cases.
In this case you are correct, by having the Tweaked pubkey alone we can not reverse it to get the original pubkey because the last step is adding two pubkeys which is not reversible (pub_tweak = pub + (t * G)).

For cases like this, it is best and easiest to use some JSON library that would create the string itself instead of trying to hardcode it yourself. In that case you just create your "array" with the addresses and amounts and simply call the ToString method to get the result you want to pass to the commandline. That should take care of all the quotes, brackets, etc. needed for a correct value.

Technically Iran wasn't a member but even more technically there was first Iran then came BRICS

One of the main reasons for creating BRICS was to challenge the dominance of US dollar and US. That means creation of new payment systems, new trade routes and relations that US can not dictate or prevent, creating a sanction proof economy, etc. Well, Iran as the most sanctions country for the longest time in history has already created all that. Iran already has sanction-proof payment systems, trade routes and partners, and a lot more.

I may be biased but to be honest the way I see it is that BRICS without Iran didn't mean much. Specially when you consider the historical role Iran (or Persia) played in the global economic scene for centuries connecting East and West by being at the heart of Silk Road, and it still is at the heart of the new Silk Road under the new name One Road One Belt.