I don't know of any plans of the sort, nor is it clear how they would work. I do know some people have been successful in recovering their passwords using tools like "John the Ripper".

Proposals are not just ideas, they must be pieces of code that patch the existing protocol. Once if they are adopted, the protocol gets recompiled on the fly and the chain carries on with the new code base.

Sorry, as a policy I don't comment on litigation.

Mu.

I think one of the largest barrier to entry for anyone in this space is the complexity of securing private keys. Getting the right UX around that seems fundamental.

I love the Starkware team and I think STARKs are going to be a key building block for scalability and privacy. There are many entities involved around Tezos but, to my knowledge, there aren't any concrete plans yet for collaboration. One of the beautiful part of Tezos is that there needs not be an explicit plan since anyone can submit improvements to the protocol.

Please ask only one question per question. I don't know about a platform like this, I know some people in the community were discussing using Kialo which seems cool. The governance model is designed to be a simple bootstrap procedure, there are many ways it can be refined.

You need interoperability in a world where you have a lot of heterogeneous chains that need to talk to each other. But why do you have so many chains to begin with? Why isn't one absorbing the user base of the other ones? The cyclical viewpoint is that pushing for interoperability is a bid for dominance disguised as a blue ocean strategy. I like the Polkadot project and the Cosmos project a great deal, but I'll note that Polkadot isn't developing its project as a Cosmos zone, and that the Cosmos project isn't putting it's atoms on a para-chain.

In order to build this, Coda has to keep the state transition function as lightweight as possible. The overhead would be prohibitive with today's techniques if your state transition were to include executing smart contracts. However, this is useful tech for making sidechains. In fact, the property of being able to carry the proof for the weight of the chain in a single SNARK is primarily useful for sidechains, less so for a primary chain. So I can absolutely see a Coda-like sidechain to Tezos.

No, I know the database would clunk under the load the way it's being used. It's not worth it until it's replaced. I also think if such throughputs are being pushed, you should add some sort of safety under partial synchrony. Polkadot's hybrid model is very interesting in that respect.