Hardware wallets are cryptographically secure devices that help keep your coins safe. Monero is currently supported by Ledger Nano (S, S Plus, and X) and Trezor Model T.
The Monero @blockchain is always growing so there is no fixed size. As of 2022, the full blockchain is around 140-150GB. A pruned blockchain is about 50GB. Check out Moneropedia entry @pruning to learn the difference between a full and a pruned blockchain.
The dev community and the Core Team agree that the protocol is stable and mature enough and biannual hard forks are not necessary anymore. Furthermore, the ecosystem around Monero has grown exponentially during the years and frequent protocol changes would be increasingly hard to coordinate, could be detrimental to the growth of the ecosystem and to the user experience. Cherry on the top, the new algorithm @RandomX is ensuring long term ASIC-resistance, so regular changes are not needed anymore. Network upgrades will still be used to add important protocol improvements and consensus changes, but at a lower and less strict frequency (every 9-12 months). The last hard fork was on August 13th 2022.
Monero can be mined on both CPUs and GPUs, but the latter is much less efficient than the former. You can get an idea of how your hardware performs compared to others, using <a href="https://xmrig.com/benchmark">xmrig benchmarks page</a> (some results might be out of date).
If you have questions or just want to confront with fellow miners, come chat on Monero Pools. On <a href="https://matrix.to/#/#monero-pools:monero.social">Matrix</a> and <a href="irc://irc.libera.chat/#monero-pools">Libera</a>.
P2Pool is a clever new way of mining Monero, which allows miners to receive the frequent payouts offered by pools without needing to trust a centralized pool. P2Pool is a Peer-To-Peer mining pool that gives miners full control over their Monero node and what it mines. More details in <a href="/2021/10/05/p2pool-released.html">the announcement post</a>.
Unlike selectively transparent alternatives (e.g. Zcash), Monero is the only major cryptocurrency where every user is anonymous by default. The sender, receiver, and amount of every single transaction are hidden through the use of three important technologies: @Stealth-Addresses, @Ring-Signatures, and @RingCT.
