I have a fire safe, actually a floor safe sunk in concrete. If you don't have one, you should get one for those important things, and even stuff that you can replace, but would be a pain, like your automobile certificate of ownership. If you rent, get a portable one, and if you can't trust your roommates, use a safe deposit box.

In my safe I have an envelope with "Bitcoin" written on it. Today, everybody knows what Bitcoin is, and when the safe is opened when you die, your heirs will find the Bitcoin envelope and the will hand it to whoever is the most techie.

In that envelope I have the backup words for the wallet on my phone, another with the backup words for the other wallet that I use for alt-coins, another with the backup words for my Trezor, and several paper wallets with various amounts of Bitcoin. If I haven't spent these when I die, my heirs should be able to extract them, and since it doesn't require paperwork, they can be quietly excluded from any inheritance tax.

Seen at my local grocery store:

Why does the Mycelium app say that 1 BCH =~ 12,787,308.04 USD?
I'm a millionaire!!  Wait...

Yes, it is.

A coin is forked after blocks are generated with both the new rules and the old rules. You are proposing new rules to return "lost" bitcoins somewhere (back to the sender?) The old rules say that a transaction must include a valid signature of the address holding the coins, but your new rules would not have this signature (because the private key was lost). Therefore blocks created with your new rules would not be valid under the old rules.

The miners don't set the transaction costs. Transaction fees are set by the users (which include exchanges) who make the transactions, or by the wallet software on their behalf.

This is a common misconception. Miners have no control over: 1. The exchange rate (price) of Bitcoin; or (2) The fees.

So who has control? The answer to both questions is: "The market."

The actual fees are set by the people who create transactions. That is, the people who send bitcoin, meaning you and me. Perhaps not completely, since we use wallets, and most wallets are very "helpful" in calculating the appropriate fee. The publishers of the wallet software could have more influence on fees, but only when they work together, because if everyone else is sending a higher fee, then your transaction will never get confirmed.

According to that IRS notice, alt coins, as well as the Bitcoin example, meet the IRS definition of "convertible virtual currency". Therefore, trading alt coins for bitcoins is not a taxable event, because it merely changes the characteristics of the virtual currency as a capital asset. Trading alt coins for bitcoins does not valuate either in US dollars at the time of trade.

Yes, that is all correct. That is why HD wallets became very popular quickly after they were introduced.

That depends on the wallet.

For example, Electrum 2.0 and later has a "sweep" function, which sends all bitcoins (less the transaction fee) in a private key (that you copy from a paper wallet) to the next address generated from the seed key.

Mycelium can import a private key (scanned from a paper wallet) into an "unrelated account", that is separate from its "Bitcoin HD" account. I don't (yet) know where the change goes when you spend from a unrelated account.

All the recommendations I have seen say to always send the entire amount when sending from a paper wallet, to avoid issues with the change address.

This happened before deterministic wallets, which are relatively new.

At the time, the wallet would create a new, random "change" address when the transaction was created. This new address would exist only in the wallet, which would then need to be backed up.

At the time, a wallet was a collection of random addresses that would have to be backed up every time a new address was created. Now, HD wallets are pseudo-random addresses that can be recreated with one master key that doesn't change.

Bitcoin has been called "Digital Gold", as an analogy.

To use this analogy, how would I transfer $20 worth of gold? If I had a block, I could shave off a piece, but then I would have to have the weight of the $20 piece certified, as well as the weight of the remaining block. A professional would charge more than $20 for this. So I wouldn't do that.

A practical way of transferring $20 of bitcoin is to use a service. For example, I use LocalBitcoins.com. I have more than $20 worth of bitcoin there. I can transfer that to another LocalBitcoins.com user for 1%. Problem solved.

A small investor can use an exchange. Personally, I have made many small (~$100) purchases using LocalBitcoins.com, leaving my BTC there until I have accumulated enough to justify a transfer to my private wallet.

Greed does not cause excessive transaction fees.

The interesting fact of transaction fees is that the people who receive them (the miners) have no control over their amount.

Users (you and I) have demanded fast confirmation times, so the wallet developers have responded, with large suggested transaction fees, based on transaction fees of other unconfirmed transactions.

The miners don't set the fees. To make the most money, a miner includes the transactions that have the highest fees, but it is the creators of those transactions who set the fees. They want their transaction to be included, so they send a fee high enough to be close enough to the top of the unconfirmed transaction list. We can do nothing about that as long as the number of unconfirmed transactions remains high.

Why do you say that? An ordinary person could buy 0.01BTC (with an average .0015BTC transaction fee) for about US$200.

I am worried about data breaches from Bitstamp, so I never gave them my identity (SSN). I got this message:

However, I can still log into my account, and withdraw BTC (and BCH!), which I should probably do someday, even though I don't have very much there.

Bitcoin didn't have a "pre sale".
The Bitcoin protocol was published before the first bitcoin was generated, and the Bitcoin software was made public at around the same time the genesis block was generated.
Bitcoin was not pre-mined. It simply started with the genesis block and various people mined subsequent blocks. It wasn't until a year or so later when bitcoins were sold for fiat money.
There are no Bitcoin secrets. The software and protocol was always public, and it has been analyzed to pieces. At this point Satoshi doesn't know anything more about Bitcoin than anyone else, except for its early history and the identity of its creator.

Update: I contacted Matt Luongo, the principal of FoldApp. He says:
I'll let you know more when I hear more.

They seemed to be working fine for a while, but my latest purchase of a $25 Starbucks card never happened, and they fail to respond to my email messages. Has anyone else been able to reach them?

The Bitcoin protocol is designed to produce one block every 10 minutes. If the number of miners goes down, the difficulty will automatically adjust to keep the block time approximately the same. Thus, transaction speed will not change.

Because bitcoins are measured in Satoshis (.00000001 BTC), as an integer value, the block reward will actually go to zero, 4 years after it goes to 1, because 1 divided by 2 is 0, when using integer arithmetic.

Use the LocalBitcoins.com "Buy bitcoins with cash" option. You agree on a price, then meet at a public place (like a fast food restaurant). The only picture ID needed is the picture of Benjamin Franklin. Obviously, make sure the seller gives you the correct secret key that he gets when he releases the bitcoin before you let him leave with the cash.