There are many reasons to run your own node like increased privacy and control. Some mobile SPV wallets allow you to set them to connect to your node at home for example. You might also want to run your own Lightning node that requires a full node, your own explorer, development…
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That is a fun moment to be in for sure.
Enjoy…
- Whether it is a hosted or some other wallet, I will always own a private key. It’s just that my private key will be stored in an exchange server in the case of a hosted wallet. Looking for confirmation here.
- Does owe a hosted wallet mean that I am trusting a third party to take care of my funds hence compromising the security of my coins.
- Is a hardware wallet the best way to transmit funds without much hassle.
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Yes, I have never seen an exchange that would give you access to the private keys to your wallet, if you know of such an exchange, that is not a dex, do let me know! 
Hardware wallets are considered the most safe because they store the keys on the device and sign transactions ensuring the private keys never leave the device. 
Thanks, @Alko89. I do appreciate the help.
Is my first inference correct?
Like… Can I own a private key in case of a hosted wallet? Will I ever be able to access it?
Helpful explanation.
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Not sure, I don’t use these kinds of wallets. In case of exchanges, no. Maybe there are some hosted wallets that allow you to export your private key, I’m just not familiar with them and I wouldn’t use them anyway.
What do you guys think of Blockstream and decentralization? Please share.
I understand that there is a limited number of Bitcoins with a cap of 21M. How can one be ensured that the hard code will not be changed and that one day someone will be able to create/“print” more bitcoins?
There have been discussions in the past to raise the limit but due to lack of consensus to do this it hasn’t been implemented. If one day the devs do decide to raise the limit there will surely be another hard fork to be able to pick sides 
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I don’t have much thoughts about them, they don’t pay me salary 
Interesting. Thanks again for taking the time to respond.
But do you think they can “take over” BTC and thus make it the same nonsense that BTC is trying to prevent? …so centralization…?
Not really, they are just a company that offers second layers like Liquid for Bitcoin and also contribute some code to the Bitcoin core.
I’m guessing if they would want to attack the core bitcoin the community would fork and Blockstream would be left out.
@ivan
Regarding the lecture on orphaned and stale blocks, Block time, and confirmations -
There were two blocks blue and yellow, and the yellow was part of the long-chain that’s why the blue block was considered stale. As these two blocks were mined together then they may have contained some same transactions. As soon as the blue block was dropped, its transactions were placed back in mempool and making them unconfirmed again.
How are these common transactions will going to be dealt with?
Txs that are already part of the other block that is not stale will simply not go into the mempool since they are already confirmed.
Nodes verify transactions before they go into the mempool again and so these txs would contain UTXOs that are already spend and therefore not valid.
I dont understand how you can decrypt a message using the private key if you cant decrypt the private key using the public key 
The process is a bit complicated and tbh I forgot how it works exactly, we used to do it by hand in school (with smaller numbers obviously). There is a good explanation of the Elliptic curve at the beginning of our Privacy course you can check out to learn the process in more detail.
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I’m confused about how the nonce is determined. Is it randomly generated by the software protocol of
Bitcoin then all the mines compete to guess it. Or is it a number that is guessed by the miner because it works below the target number?
Because if it is the latter and you know the target number couldn’t you code a mining system to only guess below that number.