Basic mathematics including combination which we learned in high school is not going to help you break ECC or solve ECDLP. Not to mention that one could find this information with a quick search in Google since as I said this is basic math.

SEC estimated these years based on a simple extrapolation and haven't updated the document ever since
This is why the table 3 in Standard for Efficient Cryptography v2 states that ECC with 128-bit security level (256-bit key size) protects until year 2040 (2030 is for ECC-224).
https://www.secg.org/sec1-v2.pdf

I believe the number is also based on MIPS years, that is the estimated amount of work performed in one year by a computer operating at the rate of one million operations per second. The values in SEC.1 v2 are from 2009.

Interest in joining BRICS from all countries even from US-slave countries like France, shows the New World Order and the weakening of United States and the fiat they keep printing called dollar! However, this "weakening" is slowly happening and I don't think the chances of a catastrophic collapse is that high right now hence bag holding a lot of dollars in reserve while slowly dumping it as China is doing is the low risk move.

P.S. Is there any source that shows China's reserve currencies explicitly separated by their type? Because it seems like all sources including the state administration report an aggregated value of all assets (not just dollars) converted to dollar, it even states the change in value is due to "asset price changes" and I know some sources like worldbank reporting the $3.17 trillion include China's gold reserves in it.

As much as I like bitcoin but it is not yet ready for mass adoption, the price of it is too unreliable for such a large long term commitment like what BRICS countries are making. Imagine if you buy a million barrels of oil (what oil tankers usually carry) worth $80 million in bitcoin and the price drops by 10% which is a normal thing in bitcoin. That is $8 million loss. That's not favorable.
However a centralized currency created and controlled by them is a lot more reliable because they dictate its value (exchange rate) so it can be kept fixed.

At this point bitcoin is good for small size trades and as a small portion of the reserved assets of the country.

That looks more like a dead cat bounce than a pump. A real pump is what happened in April and ended just as abruptly too when price reached 360+ satoshi (50%) or in November last year from 310 to 760 (145%).
Any pump now should be going back to above 300 sat at least, not what happened past week with a tiny rise from 213 to 240 satoshi (12%).

I also have no clue what any of this have to do with Hollywood!

That's a good point. I have been wondering about this too and I wonder whether in the future the replacement for dollar is going to be one or more CBDC.

I suppose it is possible too because a CBDC is technically a new currency and can have different characteristics. I'm just theorycrafting here but something like digital-yuan (the Chinese CBDC currently in use) could have a fixed exchange rate but be only used within the bloc between "friendly" countries while with others (like US and EU) they trade using the old methods with the old always-decreasing exchange rates to stay in competition.

That way they could solve the problem with fiat in international trades to some extend while replacing dollar in most of their trades decreasing their dependence on it.

That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard, although pretending to support bitcoin from candidate wannabes is not a new thing. It happened in the past elections in US too.

But this is dumbest because it is not even possible to do so. For starters POTUS is not capable of making such a fundamental change. The regime decides these things and they won't allow strengthening of bitcoin that threatens existence of the dollar.
Secondly due to the gigantic amount of dollar the the regime has printed so far the exchange rate they have to set for bitcoin (to be backing the dollar) has to be something like $10 million per bitcoin. That means shooting the price up and US is not capable of accumulating that much bitcoin to back its massive amount of worthless dollars.
Finally bitcoin is not gold that they can fool the world with by saying they have the backing gold safe and sound. They'd have to publish an address which anybody could verify and the world will know instantly if they break the ratio which we know they have no other choice but to do that. Over the past couple of months ever since the debt ceiling was raised they printed over a trillion dollars!!!

Not returning someone else's money you've found is stealing in my books, so obviously I'd return such a thing but most importantly I don't want others to do something like this to me (not return my money if I lose it some day) so I don't do it to others.

It's fine to have no witnesses (zero length).
In a transaction with witness you have to have the same number of witness stacks as your inputs so when you have 7 inputs you have to have 7 witness stacks but some of those outputs that are being spent (like first and second) are legacy so there is no witness needed hence the empty witnesses (OP_0) but the others (like the third) have a witness stack hence the 4 items in that stack.

That's not it.
I'd say this is a terrible code to have in a library because it is supposed to handle things that are different and are not supposed to be treated or handled the same way.
For starters it is handling scripts and witnesses which are entirely different things. Scripts are scripts! They contain OP codes including PUSHDATA and are supposed to be interpreted to "build" the stack with the "operations" you have to perform. Hence the 4 branches handling 0x4c,0x4d,0x4e.
On the other hand witness is already a stack, it is not-supposed to be interpreted and it does not include OP codes including PUSHDATA. It only has count and size. The code also assumes you have read and discarded the count.

In simple terms this method handles apples and oranges at the same time which is why it looks weird.

In a script you have OP_PUSHDATA1 so the first 4 branches handle those with a condition that it is not-witness so that they know what data to "push to the stack" while the last branch (the else part) is handling the witness (not SegWit output or address) so it has to read a var_int (aka compact_int) indicating the size of the item that is already on the stack.

A quick way to determine if a wallet is not using deterministic signing is to sign a transaction twice and see if the hash changes. If it did, the wallet is not using RFC6979 but if it didn't you still have to check the code to make sure.
Message signing should also work since the process is the same.

They "buy US debt" and keep their exchange rate low because they want to force US to be dependent on China. If we look at the history, like the past 40-50 years we have a very weak country with no economy to speak of and no production while the population is enormous (about 850 million) and 85% of them are living in absolute poverty. That is 720+ million people who had literary nothing.

40-50 years ago there were two powers the US and USSR and they were fighting. China took advantage and created that dependence, slowly but surely. That way they grew. US also had no choice but to give China all these benefits, from technologies to investment. Otherwise the communists China would have played a 100% USSR favored game.
But at some point US regime realized while they were busy trying to destroy their competitor USSR, China had been growing too much and US was already heavily depending on China.

Now here is the thing, this used to be China's strategy to grow. Today almost all countries have lots of relations with China so China no longer "needs" US like before. At the same time when US publicly announces that China's economic growth is a threat to US national security (ignore how absurd that is) they are in fact declaring war on China. So China also retaliates by screwing US, for example they dump $175 billion of the US bonds they were bag-holding, they join the dedollarisation wagon, they respond to the tariff war with tariff of their own, they disrupt exporting goods to US to disrupt their market, they manipulate the energy market to keep the prices up and damage US economy, they reduce or stop export of raw materials, and a lot more...

It is super expensive to produce almost everything inside US because it is a capitalist democracy.
Certain things like food is a different matter, because US is massive and has lots of fertile land for farming so it is still possible to do domestically not to mention that food is considered a strategic good so there is no way in hell they'd let US be fully depended on another country for that.

Other things like "postal service" that you mentioned are "services" not products and sometimes they can not be outsourced, they have to remain domestic.
With products like a phone, there is always competition. If you manufacture a phone inside US and have to sell it for $5000 while China manufactures the same exact thing but for $500 you simply can not compete and nobody is going to buy the $5000 domestic phone! Not to mention that they won't even be able to afford to pay that much even if there were no alternative!!!

Exactly. The bigger problem that sometimes is overlooked is that these currencies (BRICS or EURO) are considered as replacement for dollar which means United States regime will do everything in its power to prevent it from happening. In fact US is the only regime in the world that if you dump their currency they consider it as an act of war. They've bombed countries for less...

As for the fate of BRICS currency, I think the chances of success is higher than euro. One main reason is that members of BRICS are more independent than Europeans and unlike the time euro was created, today US is weak.

Keep in mind that they haven't "eliminated" dollar from their international trades, they have decreased its usage. For example China as the biggest bagholder of US debt has dumped $175 billion of it last year but they are still bagholding more of it.

As you correctly pointed out, this is a gradual move where every country goes through the dedollarisation process.

The 15th BRICS summit is going to be very interesting which will be held on 22 – 24 August (about a month from now) and some are saying the BRICS new currency will be revealed then. This could potentially have a significant effect on the ongoing dedollarisation around the globe.

There is always room for more improvement but the real question is how much time you want to dedicate to solving a problem and how much you want to improve. If we go from for example 10 minutes and 1 GB memory usage to 1 second and 1 kb memory, that is an improvement but if we go from 1 second to 0.9 second and 1 kb to 0.5 kb, that is not much of an improvement.

Take the code I posted above, the usage of C# BigInteger in a loop will create a lot of garbage for the garbage collector to collect (due to the underlying array allocated on the heap) hence it not only wastes memory but also slows down the code. But it is a short loop with low number of iterations and the whole thing takes less than a second so spending time trying to fix that is a waste of time.

Now about your suggestion, it has to be tested and benchmarked but the problem I see is that when you say a number has to be divisible by X, that is not something we just know but something we have to calculate that means extra steps or in other words possibility of adding additional bottlenecks instead of optimizing the existing code. Not to mention that division itself is generally a slow process.

This subject never made any sense to me specially with statements like this:

People in the "cryptocurrency community" should know better than other people that CBDC is not offering anything fundamentally different from the fiat that they are already using every day. CBDC is another currency issued by the banks and both controlled and used through the banks which is practically similar to fiat which is also issued and controlled by the banks and almost always used through the banks (except when you use cash but who is these days?).

You already don't have any privacy when you use banks and using CBDC isn't going to change that.

A good way to invest in bitcoin while having no extra money to spare is to start getting some extra money that you couldn't before!
This would make more sense with examples.
One way is to get extra money is to cut back on a bad habit like smoking and invest the money you were wasting before in bitcoin.
Another good way is to sell some stuff you don't need, something second hand you no longer need and is occupying space. You can sell them on Craigslist or the equivalent in your country or just a good ol' yard sale. Then you invest that money in bitcoin.
And of course as OP said a job or even a second job (could be online as freelance or something similar) would give you extra money too.

You can't even begin to compare premine with early adopters because there is a difference between an unequal distribution and unfair distribution.

As a rule of thumb if you can find a single unit in a cryptocurrency that YOU couldn't mine, that cryptocurrency has an unfair distribution. But if you can find some coins that YOU chose not to mine that is an unequal distribution not unfair.

That is why premine is unfair, the creator of that shitcoin is the only one who is capable of printing those coins making it unfair and centralized.
One being early or having invested more than others doesn't make it unfair, it just makes it unequal because there was no restrictions or preference being enforced on anybody preventing them from mining any of the bitcoins in circulation starting from block #1 and the very first block reward.

Again you are making a wrong comparison.
The fork that ethereum had was to roll back blocks, which is to effectively remove one of the main principles of cryptocurrencies called immutability of their blockchain. So ETC still is immutable while ETH is not.
On the other hand things like bcash are copies of bitcoin that have nothing to do with bitcoin. They just copied the code and the chain (history) to create a new coin.

Another way to look at this is that all the attempts to push the price below $30k has failed which means the chances of going lower is diminishing every day. And in my opinion that's the best speculation we can have since the market is uncertain. Only that the chances of a drop is decreasing every day.

Here is a math trick:
n! = n* (n-1)! = n*(n-1)* (n-2)! = n*(n-1)*(n-2)* (n-3)!
525! = 525*524*...*492*491 * 490!
Now the equation is simplified like this:
525*524*...*492*491 * 490! / 35! * 490!

So we actually need to only compute 525*524*...*492*491 (roughly 35 multiplication) and 35! (roughly another 35 multiplication) then do a division.
This code takes less than a second to run, it also doesn't consume memory.