there has been lots of "huge" hacks over the years each in multi million dollar value ranges and nothing bad has ever happened to the crypto market because it is some of the exchanges and people are already used to seeing weak security from their exchanges anyways and the values may seem high but the market is, believe or not, bigger than these amounts to be affected by them.

the only thing we can do is to stop using centralized exchanges and move towards more decentralized options. even if a weakness is found in DEX it will only affect a small number of users for a small sum of money.

they are the same.

that's the idea. one of the methods to compute public key (which is multiplying the key numeric value by generator point) is that key (shown as d) is going to be split into smaller powers of 2 parts  (d0 + 2d1+...) then for each 1 an addition then a doubling occurs and for each 0 only point double is performed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliptic_curve_point_multiplication

i do believe that Satoshi wanted the identity "Satoshi Nakamoto" to remain a symbol and as the creator only instead of someone who we keep looking up to for everything which would turn him into the "owner/controller". which may be one the main reasons for his leave and that keeps bitcoin more decentralized.
this could be a good explanation why those coins never move. also the fact that Satoshi may already have more coins from more recent blocks than early ones.

it depends on how you define "moon". i define it as $1 million and i agree that it requires a lot more development and a ton of additional work to make bitcoin better and capable of handling that kind of huge adoption. but most important of all it needs time.

but everything else that people usually refer to as "moon" like breaking the previous ATH,... are just the natural growth that we will inevitably see sooner or later. we can't expect the moon to be reached in one go. it will take lots of rallies and lots of bubbles with their corrections before get there.

in this process we will see many come and go but when we analyze the end result when the hype subsides we can see that the community has significantly grown.

over the past week or so we have had some price rises and even the psychological barrier at $10k was broken. that simply means these days are officially "make a random price guess" day.
it is not surprising to hear these kinds of statements and people who post them. they are always exciting specially when they are ridiculously big or small like last year when we kept hearing how price is falling to $1k

considering you own this site, where did you get this number from? it seems too huge to me. there might have been a couple of million people who temporarily invested in bitcoin during the 2017 hype but they weren't long term.

i wouldn't say it is absolutely useless for anything else. but at the same time i can make this conclusion based on my observation. as i said i have not seen it be used for anything else successfully.

that's the problem, "can be used" is very different from "is being used". for example could you show me a place where Namecoin is really being used as a DNS alternative in real world?

the blockchain on its own has no value at all specially when there are centralized blockchains. the technology is created to be used decentralized.
so far i have not seen any usage other than using the blockchain for creation of a currency and for that only bitcoin has been successful and maybe coins like monero that have focused on anonymity. and the real value in that case can be easily seen in the way bitcoin works.
there has been a lot of attempts, like what you said about social media, but they have either failed badly or ended up being centralized which is another type of failing.

my heart goes out to all the colored people in US and all those who have been the victims of racism that seems to be a part of US culture. but to be honest i don't see why bitcoin is being pulled into all this, i can't see anything that bitcoin could solve here!

this is a common misunderstanding of Bech32 SegWit addresses. the flags in bitcoin core policy that prevent transactions from spending a P2WPKH output that was created from an uncompressed public key are only standard flags which means you can create this address type from an uncompressed pubkey too.
but in practice since nearly all nodes and miners are already enforcing standard rules such funds sent to this type of address would be lost until a miner decides to make an exception.

yes there are many different valid addresses that can be generated from a single public key (that is derived from a private key) like P2PKH, P2WPKH, P2SH-P2WPKH, P2SH (multisig), P2WSH (multisig),... each script hash can also contain different scripts with that same public key like P2PKH inside a P2SH.
read my comment again specifically the last paragraph.

obviously yes!

after halving price always stabilizes like this so there is not much expected out of bitcoin. and now since the bitcoin price is going to be stable and most traders know this, they would go to shitcoins and start pumping those specially since lately altcoins have been getting dumped a lot due to bitcoin volatile price. so there is a good chance of money going over to altcoins for a while and pumping them while whale accumulators continue buying bitcoin dips and filling their pockets to get ready for the breakout. and then the shitcoin pumps get dumped and the profit + capital comes back to bitcoin for a bigger push.

the problem is not with trading or holding. the problem is with WHAT you are trading or holding. in fact OP lost money because he was holding altcoins!
and he is not alone in this. i dare say 90% of the newcomers in 2017 and 2018 have lost a lot of money to altcoins. because they came in and saw a lot of fake advertisement promising them bright future while selling them garbage. the rest is history...

there are so many questions smashed together here. so lets start from the beginning: creating a private key.
to create a new private key you have to choose a random number between 1 and N (which is a little smaller than 2^256 but lets skip that for now) you can't choose any arbitrary size bytes like 99 bytes, it needs to be close to the final size which is 32 bytes otherwise you'll have to reduce it and it can create bias (which 99 bytes would).

now that you have chosen that number, it means you have also chosen a corresponding point (x and y coordinates) on the secp256ik1 curve which is called your public key and can be shared freely. it is computed by performing Elliptic curve point multiplication (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliptic_curve_point_multiplication).

to understand that you have to first understand how bitcoin works.
when someone sends bitcoin they are basically creating a "lock" that can be "unlocked" by providing an "unlocking mechanism" like a key that can only unlock that "lock".
some of these "locks" have a certain standard pattern that we have defined a human readable form for them. for example if the pattern is OP_DUP OP_HASH160 <160-bit hash> OP_EQUALVERIFY OP_CHECKSIG we use the version 0 bitcoin address for it.
but this locking mechanism could simply be OP_DUP OP_HASH256 <256-bit hash> OP_EQUALVERIFY OP_CHECKSIG where we don't have any human readable form (aka address) defined for it but it does the exact same thing.

keeping that in mind, the answer to your question is one of the common addresses known as P2PKH and a new address that is also common P2WPKH are using the HASH160 of public key which is RIPEMD160 of SHA256 of public key.
but there are some other addresses that are more complicated than that. for example P2SH addresses that are HASH160 of a script that may or may not contain a public key. they also are defining a "locking mechanism".

they are trying so hard to deny the fact that bitcoin is growing and buy themselves more time. for now they will continue denying and rejecting bitcoin but soon they will make a 180 degree change and embrace it or maybe even create a shitcoin themselves and eventually be crushed and lose a lot of money exactly because of what they will have done.


i think you don't know what the word "pump" means
even in huge markets that only move a couple of percentages you can't consider the rise bitcoin recently had as a "pump". not to mention that even 30% rise is not surprising in bitcoin...

you can also go nuts testing base58 encoding (same thing that private keys use) with testnet addresses since they are also random (hash of each address is random) and can have 2 different starting characters (m or n).

here is an example i found by generating a couple of different mnemonics on https://iancoleman.io/bip39/ (change Coin to BTC - Bitcoin Testnet)
addresses:

note that i didn't change anything else like path,... it is all default values. and there is only 1 address that starts with n. the rest start with m!

that is the definition of a "different transaction" and RBF is categorized under the same name, you can even technically call it double spend. it doesn't matter if the input(s) and output(s) of the transaction is the same. as long as the transaction hash is different (even if values are the same and signature changes like using a different k) it still is going to be a different transaction.

the only difference between RBF double spend and other forms is that nodes are more accepting of this type.

in my opinion the banks don't need to create something new to "defeat" cryptocurrencies or at least try to. they can do it right now with fiat that they already control.
from what i see, one thing that sometimes is forgotten is that "cryptocurrency" is not going to be successful because of "crypto" part or the "blockchain" part but it is successful because of the decentralized part of it. look at bitcoin and compare with all the altcoins that are mostly centralized. none of them have anything to say. of course banks can make things very hard, as they have done and as they have even prevented people from buying bitcoin (like in India for example)  but it will never stop them from buying bitcoin.

i don't see any altcoin rallying to be honest, there are some random pumps here and there which disappointingly fail to gain any meaningful sizes and get crushed under the selling pressure created by the desperate bag holders who have been waiting for an exit.

as for bitcoin it seems like we are in the accumulation phase that always happens right after the halving where the market is trying to come to a balance while cooling down the hyped up pre-having state and at the same time handle the huge 50% reduction in the new supply production.

no i don't see any difference in the sense that the article is trying to suggest. i believe bitcoin to continue on as it was before which is increasing adoption every year faster than the last. there won't be any new financial order or anything like that anytime soon. but there will be a lot more people fleeing from the corrupted banking system to the decentralized bitcoin system specially in countries that there is a severe case of corruption going on like in US or India. all the printed money due to COVID19 will hasten that too. but again that will be increased bitcoin adoption no the way the world works.