Yes. The developers of Bitcoin Knots created a copy of Bitcoin Core project which in software development is called a fork (not to be confused with what we call fork in cryptocurrencies). They made certain non-consensus related changes which they believe is an improvement on the original project.

As far as consensus rules go, they are both exactly the same since they are both "bitcoin" clients.
But they have different preferences, for example Knots give you more flexibility on controlling how your node operates. Like not relaying abusive or spam transactions to try and keep the bitcoin blockchain clean.

BTW if you ask me most of the stuff you read these days about "core vs knots" is being blown out of proportion.

It is tough to say specially at this time when economy has become unstable and risky with prices rising. Which means you want both at the same time, job security and higher income are now equally important. The best option at a time like this is in my opinion to get a more reliable job that pays the bills but try to have some additional income on the side, like a second job, an investment, even trading could work. That way you have something to fall back on, even if the pay is low, but also you have the secondary income to help the financial situation.

It mainly depends on what you mean by "potential".

True potential requires real utility which altcoins lack. Take bitcoin for example. It has true potential because it has a real utility as "money" (store of value and medium of exchange). That is not true about altcoins. Majority of them were created to be pumped and dumped.
To recognize true potential in any altcoin you need to be an expert at a technical level to go through the project, check their paper, their protocol, look at the code, run their main client, etc. Something that most people are not capable of doing. But if you find one, then you are in for real treat (imagine finding bitcoin back in 2009).

But another definition of "potential" which you probably you have in mind could be short term profit gained from a quick pump aka market manipulation. This is difficult because as I said you would be trying to predict market manipulation. Although there are signs but finding such pumpable shitcoins at early stages is very difficult and risky because if you fall for fake advertisement you can end up losing a lot of money, we are talking about shitcoins after all...

The 4 options you mentioned here are actually very risky (even what you called expert advice) because again we are talking about market manipulation. They will lie if they are paid enough money...

"be hashing"? You mean mining?
You don't mine bitcoin by just running a full node. For mining you are going to need specialized hardware called ASIC which you need to purchase and use up electricity to run so that you have a decent enough hashrate to mine bitcoin.

It is unlikely. Check out the fees, it is clear that the Ordinals Attack is no longer a thing. They have not been able to congest the mempool enough to raise the fees with their spam attack. So there wouldn't be any kind of incentive for a miner to switch to a copycatcoin (which is what it would be if they forked bitcoin, something like bcash, bgold, bsilver,...). Even when the attack began and the spam was at maximum the incentive to switch to such a fork was not enough.

Not to mention that at the end of the day what is being referred to as BRC20 is NOT part of Bitcoin protocol so if they create a shitfork where the only purpose is to allow these "arbitrary data" to be injected into the chain, they would be competing with actual token creation platforms such as Ethereum. In other words such a fork would be dead before it begins because the only reason why gullible newbies even considered this garbage when it came out was because it was using the bitcoin chain and bitcoin name to advertise it self even though this was never a token!

Price rise should have technically slowed down the more adoption grew, so you can't really extrapolate the price data like this. It is like an S curve.
On top of that, the market is being affected by a lot of other factors such as the global recession we all went through due to the COVID19 pandemic. That recession slew down the rise significantly, meaning it breaks the pattern.

There are multiple reasons for different fee spikes. So when you see fees going up, it can be because of one or more of these reasons:
1. No blocks having been found for a longer than usual time
Because of the way PoW works (you may get unlucky and not find any blocks), there are times where no miner finds any blocks for a while. It could be an hour for example, which means instead of having found 6 blocks (1 per 10 min) only 1 were found so 5x block_tx_count transactions would be left unconfirmed therefore creating a congestion.
This one doesn't last that long since the congestion is not that big and they are rather rare.

2. Major price movements
Whenever price goes up or down, suddenly and big, a lot of traders move their coins to and from exchanges. That increased on-chain activity increases the "demand" for the limited block space therefore increases the fees.
This is why we always have congestion during big bull runs. And these ones last longer than #1 but the duration depends on the market activity.

3. Spam attacks
Spam attack is basically when an entity or a group starts intentionally injecting a large number of transactions into the mempool that serve no purpose other than creating a congestion. I recorded some of the cases a couple of years ago here.
These types of congestion can last a lot longer than any others because they are intentional.

We can categorize abusive transactions such as those involved in the Ordinals Attack as a spam attack as well because they did the same thing by abusing the system.

Yes, that would be reason #2

I know bcash is a shitcoin, it don't need to bag-hold it to know that

Only US military would use the most expensive supposedly stealth strike fighters to bomb civilian boats at sea

But jokes aside Unless you live in Puerto Rico it is unlikely for any movement in an airbase inside US soil to be related to this. For starters the distance would at least be 3000+ km (2000+ miles) from Florida (obviously more from deeper inside mainland). F-35 needs multiple refueling and the cost would be through the roof.
But also even though US doesn't seem like having any operational aircraft carriers, there are already air-assets deployed to Puerto Rico including the shitty and super expensive MQ-9 drones which most probably were used in this strike.

3 years later this term is being used more...


+
(4) recession
(5) corruption
(6) Trump
(7) genocide
( debt
(9) isolation of USA

I'm still curious to know what Americans think.

You are right but this is a very complex matter. To put simply I'd say they want to have their cake and eat it too! You see, lowering interest rates would help the US economy start getting out of recession, it will help attract investors in the production sector and create jobs. Which are all positive speculations. But the US economy has turned into a debt based economy. Even the government functions like that. But when the government creates debt, it needs to be able to "sell" that debt to other countries and have them bag-hold that debt (the bonds the US gov. sells).

Now the problem is that with the World Order being established in the multi-polar world, other nations are not as willing as before to buy the US debt. For example China has already dumped IIRC $400 billion of those bonds.
The interest rates is what encourages them to continue bag-holding the bonds and maybe buy more (like Japan buying more). If they cut rates, not only the dump may speed up but also they will have a harder time convincing other countries to buy more of the US debt. That means more domestic inflation. That will discourage investors again!

P.S. Trump's involvement in crypto space is not an investment type of involvement, it is more like a scammer tactic. They created useless shittokens (which requires virtually zero investment) and sold it to gullible people and made millions.

You have some good points here. Although I wouldn't say "survival of the fittest" at least not in the system that is now coming to an end. It is more like survival of the most brutal and barbaric regimes who do anything for resources and control.

Look at the past 200-250 years. The colonizers who had their economies thrive (specially after WW2 where they destroyed the rest of the world) didn't thrive because they were the "fittest". They thrived because they were the most barbaric and slaughtered everyone else to steal their resources.

These principles in the West are not different today either. We are watching the genocide West is committing in Gaza live with HD quality every day and it is all over resources and control so that they can "survive".

After the miserably failed terrorist attack that NATO-Zionist Axis carried out in the capital of Qatar (a gas station with a dictator who thinks buying weapons from US and having the largest US military base there protects them) the US regime needed a distraction from that failure as the criticism of Trump was growing.

This is why the Axis carried out this public elimination of one of its disposable assets as a distraction...

It's also two birds with one stone. In the near future the US regime will use this public execution (carried out by the regime itself) as an excuse to attack supporters of Palestine who have been protesting against the ongoing genocide that US regime is carrying out in Gaza...

I disagree. The reason why the West is getting weaker every day (with US at the head) is not because others are growing. What would BRICS's growth even "destroy" the US economy? That makes no sense to me.

No, I believe that the reason why the West is falling apart is because of their own corruption. Decades of corruption, stealing, pillaging, warmongering, slaughtering people in other countries, arming terrorist groups, and so on has had a heavy cost and they are now paying the price.

Look at France for example. They were strong because of their colonies and the more colonies they lost over the past couple of years, the weaker they got. Their government just fell apart and today there are massive protests across the country and life practically was halted in France as they "blocked everything"...

It's similar for the US. The only reason why US economy existed after WW2 was because they forced the rest of the world to buy into their Ponzi scheme. We all know Ponzi schemes don't last forever and they have to fall apart at some point. If not now, it will be tomorrow.
Nobody in the US should have expected to be able to print dollar indefinitely and have the rest of the world continue buying the debt they keep creating.

If the global tensions continue to grow and certain wars expand the chances of a rate cut will be lowered. For example yesterday evening Zionists carried out a terrorist attack in Qatari capital and bombed the residential areas there. Oil price jumped a little in reaction. There is also US regime threatening the oil rich Venezuela and if these two escalate more we can see oil price shoot up which would translate into inflation going higher. And we know they are less willing to cut rates if inflation goes up...

By definition Bitcoin is money and it already is store of value and you can use it to create passive income for yourself. But to do that you'll have to invest that "money" into a real business that generates you passive income. That business can be your own (eg. imagine you are running an exchange) or it could be invested into someone else's business assuming you accept the risks that it will have (like investing in a casino like freebitco.in that used to be safe and gave a decent return, it no longer is safe though).

The point is these two characteristics are complementary not contradictory.

Such a thing has absolutely no effects on the cryptocurrency market in the short term considering it is too local (US related and not global) and it is going to mainly affect the US markets (assuming they cut rates now or any time in the future).

In the long run as cutting rates at this point would lead to higher inflation, that can help the bitcoin price go up. And if that leads to a bull run that lasts longer than a couple of weeks then we can expect the altcoin market to see some rises as well as "newbie money" comes into it.

^^ Definition of gullible.

Let me introduce you to the former president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai who was president during the US invasion of and war crimes in Afghanistan. https://www.aparat.com/v/vulzfo1
Translation:
Karzai asks US regime officials "whether the bombs going off in Kabul or the bombs going off in Afghanistan villages killing dozens of women and children at a time were considered terrorism".
"No", they responded!
He asks them "then what is terrorism?".
"Terrorism is when our interests are threatened" responded the rogue US regime.

Right now the Venezuelans have control of vast amounts of resources (one of which is oil) inside Venezuelan soil and US regime interests is threatened because they don't control it instead! So now innocent people are being slaughtered by the US regime in clear act of terrorism (FYI the fast moving drug boats don't have 11 "kingpins" in them, they have at most 3 or 4).

US economy (like many other economies) is already in a recession. The governments just don't want to admit it already to prevent the recession from getting worse. In fact one of the reasons why Trump is pushing for a rate cut like this is the fact that US economy is in a recession and the belief is that cutting rates fixes it.

I we ignore the COVID19 recession and its unprecedented high unemployment rate due to the heavy recession of that time, this is an ATH in the past 8 years (last was around June-July 2017).

But the key point here was the negative market reactions not the rate itself.

The reasons some users mentioned only make sense if there were only 1 or 2 cases listed on that website that were like this. But since there are a lot of them (73 right now) it can't be explained that easily. All I can say is that the bitnodes.io website in my experience, has had fake nodes listed for some reason. For example a while ago I was trying to test syncing and some other stuff and when I tried connecting to some of the nodes listed there using my own code, I realized their list contains fake nodes that even though the site may say they are synced, they do not capable of providing you with any data (eg. with block headers).

That's not solid planning though, specially in bitcoin market where it has been proven already that it can have long bear markets where price keeps going down instead of going up. Then you end up selling a bigger percentage of what you have to get the same fiat value out. I'm talking about a period like 2018 for example.

I would also not call it "passive income", that is more like slow liquidation of your investment. A passive income shouldn't involve your initial capital melting away but instead you should still be able to keep the 1BTC and still earn $100k.