chill1

With both Trezor and Ledger it is possible to use Electrum as the GUI (interface) app. So if they go out of business and/or stop supporting the specific hardware wallet model that you own, you can continue using it with Electrum. Alternatively, you can import the seed backup (12 or 24 words) into a new hardware wallet.

Your comment is so obviously disingenuous. It makes absolutely no sense to open a Lightning Network channel to send one transaction and then immediately close it.

No one should be using on-chain Bitcoin transactions for in-person exchange. Partly due to the high fees, but mostly because of double-spending and lack of privacy. Lightning Network solves all of these problems. Fees are much lower, settlement is instant and clear to even unsophisticated users, and the recipient cannot see from where the funds originated.

Taxes are a different issue and that's up to each jurisdiction to solve via better legislation.

I think you fundamentally misunderstand why a business might buy an asset like Bitcoin. It's certainly not to participate in a pump and dump scheme - as you seem to be alluding. It takes time for a corporation to build up a position in something like Bitcoin. And it will take time to unwind that position. This is clearly a long-term hedge.

Those are not really specific questions. But I will try my best to somehow provide useful information.

> 1. Energy efficiency of the transactions and the network

If by "transaction" you mean a single economic exchange between two agents, then the energy cost of a single transaction is impossible to measure. Many of the on-chain transactions in Bitcoin today are "batched" to reduce their total size thus saving on fees. Each of these batched on-chain transactions can easily represent dozens of individual economic exchanges. Lightning Network (LN) takes this even further with bi-directional payment channels now representing potentially tens of thousands of transactions over the lifetime of a single channel. It requires one on-chain Bitcoin transaction to "open" a bi-directional payment channel, and another transaction to "close" it. Closing is not strictly necessary and will be less so as infrastructure and tooling improves.

Bitcoin is not really one single network. It is a few different networks operating in their own niche with their own specific optimizations. Miners can operate as dumb hashing computers with no visibility or knowledge about the blockchain other than the next chunk of data to hash. Full-nodes are typically operated by the "users" that wish to carry on the mantra of "don't trust, verify"; value their personal privacy; or are a large commercial entity. The last estimates that I saw were about 10,000 publicly reachable full-nodes and another 100,000 private or non-reachable. There are also mobile wallets that can be custodial or "light clients". Then the Lightning Network (LN), which consists of public and private nodes, mobile and custodial apps, nodes backed by full-nodes and LN's version of light clients.

> 2. How democratic the process to mine new coins is.

Mining appears much more centralized than it is - due to the success of mining pools. Mining pool operators do not control all the hash power that congregates in their pool. Instead the owners of mining rigs/operators can point their rigs at the mining pool that offers them the best ROI. Of course sometimes other reasons override the profit motive but usually only temporarily - see the SegWit political / governance drama from a few years ago. Corporations (and governments) have already started investing in mining equipment in an effort to secure their own interests in the space. They will compete with each other here just as they have competed with each other over territory and natural resources for hundreds of years.

> 3. What steps are taken to manage frauds, speculations bubbles etc. to protect malicious actors from gaming the system.

Bitcoin is governed today by the same laws and rules as other systems. Fraud is fraud is fraud. Criminals, scammers, and fraudsters use banks and cash too. From the sound of it, you would prefer to err on the side of institutions and regulation. I disagree, and would prefer that individuals take personal responsibility for their own education and finances. The world is a messy place and there is no answer for 100% of the people 100% of the time.

> I would love to be proven wrong and learn something new about the sector that increases my confidence.

That's great. Having an open mind is a good thing. What areas are you specifically interested in? The industry is vast with deep niches and history - mining, exchanges (online/offline/p2p), scripting ("programmable money"), private key security (software/hardware/multi-sig), BIPs/forks/governance, ATMs, end-user apps, scams and shills, cypherpunk history and lore, and so on.