another problem is that the wallets found on these places such as Google play don't have to contain any malware or keyloggers in traditional meaning of the word to be malicious.
for example the wallet can simply be sending your seeds to the scammers server so that in best case scenario they can only track you and worst case to steal your money. and this can never be detected by these sites because they don't exhibit any suspicious acitivity.

i don't think there will be a "second wave" of this virus, there is only the increased cases of those infected that has been speeding up and the world is learning to adapt to the new situation and the effects won't be the same as the initial impact when everyone panicked.
in fact this resilience is the main reason why bitcoin resumed its rise and consequently some of the altcoins are showing gains because of bitcoin price rise.

you are exaggerating the power of the whales and what they are doing. not to mention that most of the cases where an address or group of addresses is being counted as "a whale" is just an exchange or big service which these blockchain analyzers mess up and include in their counts to increase their report. in any case if whales had such powers of manipulating the bitcoin price as you think then bitcoin charts should have looked like any other pump and dump shitcoin in the altcoin market.

it is mainly because the internet is filled with people who may not have any understanding of bitcoin and at the same time they try to explain it to others.
using blockchain instead of bitcoin is just a tiny mistake among the bigger ones they make.

i don't see how blockchain could even be relevant in any of these industries.

one thing that is usually neglected when talking about this particular subject is the timing and timing is everything in a market specially one like bitcoin's.
take 2017 for example. we had multiple cases of a lot of whales trying to supress the rise and sell to crash the price and prevent its rise but they lost a lot of money without the price ever changing its upward direction. looking at the orderbooks at that time would have shown a small support that could theoretically be broken easily but realistically it was a lot bigger.
why? because the time was time of rise and any drop meant a huge surge in number of buys that didn't exist before.
suffice it to say that it is the same for rise too.

in other words for the past year (which i would say past 2 years is more accurate statement starting from the actual bottom) the wise investors have been accumulating bitcoin while the price of it was very low, even lower than its realistic value.

this is what "wise investors" always do, that is how they increase their wealth. they buy bitcoin while everyone else is crying about why price isn't rising.

it is like end of 2016 and start of 2017 all over again when price was between $700 and $1100 and was starting to rise and all "whale talks" started complaining about why some people were wiser than them and bought when price was something like $200.

and as we move forward on each "cycle" (when price shoots up to a gigantic bubble and then bursts) we will continue seeing a much larger scale accumulation take place by a lot bigger number of so called "whales".

checking the digital signature is only one part of the transaction verification. the other part is to check if the "coins" being spent even exist or not.
think of it as when you write a check. visually verifying if you signed the check with your real signature is only one part of the verification, the other part is the bank checking if you have the balance you are trying to give someone else.
that second step in bitcoin (checking balance) is done by checking if the inputs of a transaction exist and weren't spent before. so each full node has to have downloaded and verified the entire blockchain to create a database of all unspent transaction outputs.

the idea of decentralized bitcoin and similarly any decentralized altcoin is that you don't trust or rely on anybody else including miners or even other nodes. you download and verify everything yourself.

Yes, it will be possible to create fake ALT inputs and outputs, but in such case it will not be signed by another party! I mean, miners will not check ALT inputs correctness, but they will check that both signatures are correct.
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miners never check anything including signatures. nodes do.
as i said above the point is that a node has to be able to verify everything otherwise things become centrailzed. and you can never trust what other node tells you. it might be malicious and give you fake blocks and transactions from the other chain.

let me add a bunch more but i don't know the years so i just put them in correct order:
- (2010ish) copies of bitcoin that made meaningful changes: LTC, NMC,...
- poor copies of bitcoin and those initial projects that kept reusing the same ideas creating useless coins
- premine coins where they did the same as before but to make money they added premines
- shadowmine coins it is the same as before but instead of a transparent premine they used covert ways to premine the shitcoin
- ICO platforms which did the same exact thing as before but made coin creation cheap, fast and easy and they all have technically 100% premines since the produce the tokens out of thin air and dump it on idiots
- STO, IEO, ... are exactly the same as ICOs where they create a token out of thin air and dump it on idiots under a different name (disguise) so that they idiots don't realize it is the same scam as before.
- DeFi is also the same as all the above where they create something out of thin air, has no usage and has a lot of buzzwords in it but practically is doing the same thing!

- future? nothing is going to change. they keep creating useless coins that raise a lot of money for the creator and/or pumpers and rip off a lot of beginners. that coin also dies after a short time because of being useless.

keep in mind that similar to smart contracts, the new concept of decentralized finance is very interesting but similar to ICOs, DeFi is a total nonsense and is using the buzzword to empy the newbies pockets.

but bitcoin is not an investment, it is not stock, ... it is a currency. in fact without bitcoin being a currency it becomes worthless and things like HODL lose all meaning. you see everything has a value according to its utility. if bitcoin was only an investment then there would not be any reason for it to exist. if you think about it a little you can see that it would mean that we created a blockchain to store wealth and gain wealth and nothing else! and that makes no sense and is not a utility. not to mention it won't grow at all.

the only reason why bitcoin has grown in the past decade is because it is a decentralized payment system. and a good one at that.
coming back to your question the answer is obviously yes bitcoin needs to scale to become a better payment system.
why do you think hundreds of thousands of hours have gone into developing scaling solutions? why would they even bother with LN if bitcoin was only an investment and didn't need to scale?

i don't know, these things mentioned here are too tiny when you compare them with the horrifying corruption that has been going on in banking system for decades. it even became public after it led to 2008 recession but nothing changed!
people still continue trusting and using the same corrupt banking system and only a very small percentage of them have moved towards bitcoin.

there is an important lesson to be learnt here and that is when bitcoin price has been down for a long time and the bear market has lasted forever that means seeing more bearish moves, specifically the big drops that OP predicted become increasingly unlikely and difficult.
meanwhile a trend change becomes increasingly easy. and now we are seeing this transition start and slowly everyone accepts that the previous trend is over and we are entering the bull market.

gold can never even come close to bitcoin in terms of price growth in long term. there may be times when gold mimics bitcoin but in the end we always see that bitcoin is going up a lot more than anything else you can think of.
it is simply because bitcoin's adoption, unlike everything else including gold, is still pretty tiny and it is offering a unique and well needed utility which makes its adoption a lot bigger hence the rice is equal size to that adoption hence the bigger price rises.

no, that is not possible because the node has to fully verify any transaction that it accepts and to do that it needs to know all the inputs to be able to verify that tx and since each node is only running on one network not all of them they can not fully verify the transactions if they have inputs from another chain. the outputs don't matter because they are not verified during transaction validation.
and when you can't verify a tx fully, it becomes possible to create fake transactions.

the current way atomic swaps take place is good enough using OP_IF and and locktimes.

first of all price going up and down doesn't make something a "scam". it seems like you either don't know the meaning of the word or are just trolling here.

secondly bitcoin price went from $800 to $6000 from start of 2017 to end of 2018 (2 years). i call that a gigantic rise and whatever happened in the middle is the short term drama.

and finally price dropped from $20k because it was a bubble. it had nothing to do with fees.

i don't know about India but the thing about Chinese is that they have been aiming to maximize their target customers as much as possible. that means they are producing as many product as possible with as big a range of quality as they can.

it is from top quality hence higher price targeting customers demanding higher quality and have the money to pay for it. which are usually from developed countries.
down to low quality crap hence the lower price targeting customers that don't have the money for it, which are usually from under-developed countries.

this also includes producing parts to complete products and making all other countries including developed countries heavily depend on them.

that is how they are overtaking the world.
the "war" is already lost, the rest of the world just hasn't realized it yet

this is an obvious scam and it is pretty common, however the scammers using this method aren't usually this greedy. basically they scammed you the moment you sent them your money in first place but they saw the gullibility and wanted more. now they keep asking you to send them more money and the more you send the more they will ask.

there will never be any "payment" because this was never an "investment", this was a donation.

when using most of the altcoins such as etherum users have a lot more issues to be concerned about rather than their privacy and their IP address being recorded. that is why we see a lot of web wallet usage, no PGP verification or even existence of it for desktop wallets either. and a lot more.

if we could reach $12k in this short time there will only be a weak hand shakeout to $11.5 or something like that before the FOMO kicks in and the rally officially starts without anything stopping it.

the behavior you see (rise then fall the same amount) is because we have been always below a resistance line (that is $10k) otherwise breaking it is THE signal to buy non-stop, there won't be any big drops anymore for a long time.

it was mainly the end of the week effect that happens around sundays where fees stay down otherwise with the price rise that we had recently there should have been a bigger fee jump than this. right now it is again around 17 sat/byte.

this is not the first time to be honest with you. there has been multiple other cases. it seems like some people think just because bitcoin is decentralized and doesn't need any license to be used, they can also run a bitcoin ATM without any license or stuff like that.
here is a case from 2018 in India as an example:
https://www.news18.com/news/india/indias-first-bitcoin-atm-seized-owner-arrested-for-illegal-kiosk-1918235.html