ok lets take a closer look at ethereum.
it has no use cases. so far there has been thousands of smart contracts on this platform (known as ICOs or tokens) and none of them have done anything at all. basically the only actual purpose etherum has is to raise money. i don't know how you consider that to be "better" that a bitcoin that is a currency.

it is centralized since no individual is willing to or capable of running an ethereum full node. all the decisions, forks, roll back,... is being made by a company that owns ethereum trademark and holds majority of its supply.

it is not immutable. they have very easily (thanks to being centralized) rolled back their blockchain. that means you can never trust this centralized ledger to remain the same in the future. one day you may receive a coin and the next day the company can take it away.

it is so much slower than bitcoin on both propagation of a transaction and on confirming transactions (when you define confirmation as an irreversible transaction).

it is not scalable. in fact the scaling of ethereum is 10 times worse than bitcoin. we also saw extremely high fees in etherum network during 2017 ICO scam craze.

it may not look like it but a lot of idiots have been following this nonsense called "whale alert" and have been panic selling for things that don't make any sense compared to their latest nonsense
BTW i wouldn't call 2%-3% a "flash crash".

it is called supply AND demand. having mined even the 100% of bitcoin would still be the "supply" part not the demand. we need adoption and until that is going on with a high speed, we continue seeing volatile increasing price.

that means nothing. specially when you are including shitcoins in it.

if it were possible then we would have seen a replacement. keep in mind that it is not for lack of trying!

i dare you to show me a "better" coin.

reading the previous comment makes me wonder whether these VPS providers like Amazon,... have the capability to alter anything about the blocks/transactions before they give it back to the user. for example if the user who is running his node on an Amazon server could see his coins spent in a fake transaction that the VPS shows confirmed in a fake block?

i think you are confusing a "whale" with "superman"!

the fact is that most whales don't even understand bitcoin. they think bitcoin is some numbers on some website (aka the exchange) that they can buy/sell to make money. if you tell them about mining they wouldn't know what you are even talking about.
not to mention that to mine bitcoin one has to have ASICs. your comments suggest any whale is holding some ASICs under their bed to pull out any time they want and mine bitcoin with it.

if you want details of the algorithms used to go from a mnemonic (seed phrase) to a private key then you have to read the respective documentation. these things are always found on https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki which is the bitcoin wiki or on github among the improvement proposals (BIPs).
the two BIPs you need to read are:
https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0039.mediawiki
https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0032.mediawiki
in that order.
in short you are doing a lot of HMACSHA512 to reach a 512 bit result which is then split in half to get the private key.
2048 HMAC in PBKDF2 then at least 4 HMAC to convert that entropy to the child key.

if you are trying to create an altcoin like what first comment said, then you are wasting your time. but if your goal is to learn the things you listed such as mining,... then again you are wasting your time since you will not learn anything but just looking at the end result which is a blockchain that keeps growing. instead you have to spend a lot of times, even months, going through the documentation and the source code to see what actually happens not just the result.

i disagree. it was never "crowdfunding" that was popular any time in the past. instead it was the "gambling" on new shittokens that were being created that became popular only because some of these tokens showed some decent returns in a short time due to them being new and getting big pumps.

otherwise "crowdfunding" to this day remains something that people look at with a lot of suspicion. specially since there hasn't really been any legitimate ones in public.

yeah, it makes a lot more sense now. but i don't think we should change testnet that much specially things you mentioned here. as you said it increases the difference between the two networks and at some point testnet could become a full blown altcoin instead. not to mention that someone might want to test their POW related code (mining, reward halving, the algorithm itself,...).
i think i said this before to you, but i say it again: most (maybe even all) cases are solved using regtest instead. the other day i was reading about how you could also add another node to your regtest node .

it is a curious thing that the interest in bitcoin and its technology grows each time the bitcoin price is rising like these days. i believe the main reason for such books and search increases is for profit making. if we look back to the biggest recent interest which happened during 2017 we can see that majority of those who came in had zero interest in the technology and only learned it to scam people with things such as ICOs.

we would need another period of super hype that lasts at least 6 months for us to see a lot of common huge pumps like 500%. otherwise all we are going to see among shitcoins is the smaller pumps that could not even be sustained for long enough time to be considered a pump by altcoin standards.
and i don't think we can expect such periods for at least another year. it is time for bitcoin to rise and it would dump all the altcoins on its rise for now.

if your conclusion here were correct then resetting the testnet is not going to change anything. there still are going to be a lot of ASICs mining tbtc and it may even increase if the rest happened (reward went up to 50) and we still wouldn't be able to mine it using CPU.

i don't  think you have to necessarily connect to most nodes to get an estimation of the number of bitcoin nodes that could be connected to. all you have to do is run a full node and ask another node for an "addr" message which they would reply with a list of nodes they know of. repeating that from a couple of other random nodes could improve the accuracy but it is still an estimation.
to get all nodes (including nodes that could not be connected to) is a lot more complicated since they don't allow incoming connection and they have to connect to you.

well that math is not very simple to learn it that easily. there is a lot of new concepts involved and the whole algorithm (elliptic curve cryptography) also has certain complexity to it.
but i have found that this page here explains things in simpler terms that could get you started on understanding the whole thing, specially while looking at the curve shapes included helps with understanding the characteristics of elliptic curves:
https://blog.cloudflare.com/a-relatively-easy-to-understand-primer-on-elliptic-curve-cryptography/

all these centralized financial systems are currently shitting their pants even though they are not showing it. the recent virus spread was a big nail in their coffins. the fact that we still see them alive is thanks to all the bailouts and the happy front they put up.
news like this is only a confirmation of that. they are trying to take back a little bit of what they have lost and stay alive for a little bit longer. what they don't realize yet is that "blockchain" is good when it is used decentralized not when they use it centralized.

i am really not a fan of this kind of comparison specially when it is between bitcoin and an altcoin because there is nothing to compare with bitcoin. and more importantly by comparing percentages you can't really make a good decision, a lot of the times it can even give  you bad advice. for example if you checked this very same page in early 6 months of 2018 it all showed huge returns and many of them lasted through 2018 until 2019 while still getting dumped hard. for instance ethereum has been dumping for the past 3 years.

my suggestion is to only have the long term outlook for bitcoin and focus on short term (starting from 1 hour up to 3 days) for altcoins because that is where the altcoin profit is.

the mistake that many people made like the previous halving was that they were expecting price to jump up right before the halving and all through the halving.
but this has never been true about any market movements. the rises or falls take place as the news comes out or as the hype shapes up. which was a week or two before the halving and that caused the FOMO and price did go up a lot then had a tiny drop and here we are now.

i don't think so. they just want to solidify their position into this market even more. if i recall back when their idiot CEO called bitcoin "fraud" about a week later when the dip happened we found out that they had some hands in buying a ton of bitcoin.

you are just linking another very irrelevant event to bitcoin so the answer is that nothing will change because like many other things (new year, Chinese new year, US stimulus check, Coronavirus, some gold bagholder spreading FUD,.... none of them affect bitcoin price.
and altcoins aren't even affected by anything that goes on in the world. the only thing that affects them is their pump and dumpers who are making money by scamming newbie traders in the altcoin market.

first of all why do you use the term "cartel" here?
secondly miners do NOT verify anything. they are only performing a tedious task of computing hashes. it is the nodes that verify transactions.

if a miner rejects a transaction, another one picks it up. if a pool rejects a transaction then miners leave that pool for another one. if things get bad and a large number of miners turn malicious the nodes would create a fork and turn their millions of dollars investment into bricks by changing the mining algorithm.
in other words miners are kept in line by the nodes.