It's not a myth, I would say that even green energy used on mining is a waste producing a waste because "green energy" is not that green and energy alone could be used for something different.

As for Banking system taking more energy than Bitcoin mining - overall it might be true (still) but the problem with Bitcoin mining is the big centralization of this energy use which makes it very difficult for the surrounding environment as we can see in Texas today.

As for difficulty drop, you know what else will drop ? security of the network and due to the fact Trillion+ dollars are in this project there will be state sponsored adversaries who will be able to attack the network.

Will they actually attack ? we don't know, what we know is that the security will be low.

I don't have more time for discussion so I close this by saying: If nothing changes to the Bitcoin protocol, it will collapse.
It's economically impossible to survive.
Cheers.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think the US is holding BTC intentionally and for profit. I think they just didn't get to selling it yet, but these are just funds they seized from criminal activities, and they will be sold at some point (regardless of the price at that point). So they are holders only technically speaking, but not really. The same might apply to some other countries on the list. The fact of keeping some BTC doesn't legitimize BTC and doesn't demonstrate willingness to accept it or whatever.

If you are a newbie, then you probably wouldn't know how to generate a paper wallet in a safe enviroment and that could cost you your funds. A paper wallet is secure if you know what you are doing and if you generate your keys in an offline machine, and if you also use a recommended tool to generate your keys.

However, hardware wallets are more popular than paper wallets these days and they are easier to use, especially for a newbie, i would recommend you buy a good hardware wallet, or just run electrum in an airgapped device and back up your seed phrase in a safe location.

Deciding the ideal fee rate for unilateral exits is indeed a real problem on LN. Mempool was probably empty when you signed a commitment transaction last time with that peer, and it selected very low fee for the potential unilateral exit transaction. I never understood why the software isn't signing several transactions with different fee rates, so that when the user wants to exit, they can have choose the fee.

If RBF didn't work, you can try CPFP, but you'll have to pay at least 20 sat/vb, to have the slight priority.

This is a myth that has been injected into the crypto community again and again but it's not extremely dangerous to the environment as you exaggerate. Yes, power consumption of mining operations is high but look how much power we use/waste for the banking system to operate and I would say Bitcoin mining operation doesn't even consume 1% for mining compared to the banks so it's not just a complete waste and if miners are not being profitable anymore then there will be adjustment in the difficulty happens after every 2016 blocks mined so lesser the difficulty mean less resources are being consumed.

Hardware wallet. So you know it'll actually be done correctly, and so you can transact with your bitcoin if you need to. Contrary to popular opinion, paper wallets aren't secure if you just print them out using your personal computer and your printer. For a paper wallet to be secure, you need to generate your wallet on an air-gapped device.

read: https://chainsec.io/wallets

If you can keep the paper wallet safe from anyone and safe from any damage why not use a paper wallet?
If you want to spend you can also do a cold storage instead of buying a hardware wallet.

This is just me but I am more safe to have a wallet on a offline or cold wallet than buying a hardware wallet.

The situation is really worrying as this mining companies are purely driven by profits and they have professional advisors who can show them they can earn twice as much on different project.
On the scale they operate even couple percents would be worth switching but due to high volatility the profitability of mining must be much greater for them to switch from one project to another and the halvings make this decision much simpler - unless the market cap will be able to multiply in value after each halving in which I don't believe at this trillion+ levels.

As for BlackRock and other sharks, they just want to multiply their FIAT - they don't have any love for cryptocurrencies but will say otherwise to pump the price up.
They will have no second thought to cash it out after getting their target or seeing that there might be some unrecoverable trouble.
Again, they are not HODL'ers, they are not Bitcoin lovers, they are businessman who want to multiply their stack of FIAT and they have a lot of professional advisors. Nothing else.


Ethereum was a big contender but they switched to PoS.
Monero is feared due to their past of changing PoW to fight off ASIC's but maybe they will be interested in CPU mining - who knows.

All the other projects are noise but I could be wrong and they can view it differently.

The forum was created for the primary aim of serving as an avenue where people testing the new technology called Bitcoin could come together to share opinions, personal experiences while using the new digital coin, and possibly problems to get solutions and suggestions from others who may have knowledge about it. And we can all remember that that singular decision, actually helped and skyrocketed the price of Bitcoin to what it is today.

However, according to the data given above, we are made to understand that the domain name "Bitcointalk.org" was registered on 24th June, 2011, and was last updated on 24th November, 2019 and expected to expire on 24th June 2029

I think one of the biggest criticism of Bitcoin which comes with the very inherent flaw of it. I believe it was never designed in a way to be used by so many people. So the biggest problem it faces is the scalability issues, the moment you see a lot of on chain traffic immediately you will see the fees skyrocketing up, you will see slower transactions. Apart from this obviously the environmental impact of the Pow consensus is also a big criticism which a lot of pro environmentalists pose on bitcoin. So obviously the PoS or the hybrid solutions are becoming much more relevant to the overall situation in cryptos right now. and honestly I don't have any proper answers to the question on the scalability issues.