Any of these doable with $1000 tools budget and no specialized gunsmith tools? You get a drilled rifle blank, a standard lathe (no 1 rotation per ~16" gear or the likes, and $1000 budget for a generic hardware store with no gun stand or gunsmithing dept (that must cover both tools and materials). Can you rifle a barrel with that?

...the essence of this being that you can build pretty much anything, starting off with a hammer and building progressively more advanced tools. Ending with: to rifle a barrel you need pretty damn specialized tools, which sure you can build using generic tools, but that task is nowhere near simple; significantly more complex than rifling the barrel using these specialized tools and pretty high up the difficulty curve. We're off from cutting a groove in whatever steel the barrel is made of (not very hard), to creating a very specialized carbide blade and re-gearing a lathe. Not your average garage workshop task.

"Not that different"?

A normal inside-thread cutter is self-guiding thanks to very small step per rotation. You have some 100 blades on a single cutter, each cutting a minimal sliver of metal from the single thread it's creating, each turn is 4 blade passes through each part of the thread. There's about 1 turn per 1mm of travel. Each of the blades keeps the remaining blades aligned so you get very small tolerances despite the tool simply "screwing itself in". First 1-2 turns may be messed up before the cutter "gains traction" but the remainder is fine.

Bore has 4-8 separate grooves, each making maybe 4 turns per whole barrel length, often less. You NEED to guide its rotation. If you apply lateral (rotary) force, you'll simply cut a circle or break the blade. If you apply lengthwise force, you will get the same as with normal cutter: first 1-2 turns messed up before the cutter "gains traction". Except 1-2 turns is halfway down the barrel.
Essentially, you need an external, mechanical guide that drives the cutter in the spiral needed for the rifling. Usually there is only one blade, oriented for downstroke (cutting when pulling it out, not when pushing it in) and a mechanism that drives it back and forth through the barrel, then rotates the barrel by desired angle to cut another groove. NOTHING like normal internal thread cutter.

Because he was not successful in the uprising.
You must kill enough to overthrow the government, only then it counts.

Actually, a well-maintained, well-serviced (and possibly new) AK-47 variant is quite accurate - less than competitors but not by much. Thing is, where competitors jam and need servicing, AK-47 loses accuracy. It can withstand a lot of abuse and still keep firing, but a 40 years old AK that saw two different armed conflicts will never get anywhere near the accuracy of one that just left the production lines of IzMash.

Certainly a new, well maintained AK is perfectly suitable for all these applications. Less so than other guns, but not so much less as to make it anywhere near "unsuitable". OTOH, a backyard sale AK from Romanian armed forces surplus after surviving 10 generations of Romanian recruits is definitely on the "unsuitable" side.

Do you think that if the US told Russia "We don't intend to invade you" they would just believe and cease arming themselves? Did you think the massive military forces in Germany - INVASION FORCES (meant to push the frontline by some 100km in case of attack, and keep it there so that tactical nukes wouldn't fall on allied territory, but technically not much different from forces meant to reach Moscow) made Russian less jumpy?

What NATO intended, what NATO wished Russians to believe, and what Russians believed were three different things.
Post-1945 USA didn't have nearly sufficient nuclear weapons production capacity to make them completely sway the balance of power. Back then still a definitely superior rifle could win the war.
Sure, 5-10 years later the situation was different. But 1947, AK-47 was very relevant.

AK-46 was significantly different from AK-47, and - bluntly speaking - utter crap.
AK-47 was a fine weapon but the machining process was rather expensive, complex and slow, making it unsuitable for mass production and deployment in army.
AKM - an AK-47 variant that used stamped sheet metal instead of machined parts, became the instant hit, possessing all the advantages of the original, slightly lower mass, and being very cheap and simple to manufacture in bulk.

"Smoothbore rifle" is an oxymoron.

Smoothbore, sure. You won't create the rifling without some quite a bit special tooling though. Nothing close to normal lathe.

Note "nuggets" are fully "manual gearbox". If it jams, it means you didn't work the bolt hard enough!

They aren't very rust-proof, but not only you can use pig fat or margarine for oiling them just fine, they have so much tolerances - not only in dimensions but also in surplus power of gas piston, return spring, and a whole lot of other mechanisms, that less-than-excessive amount of rust will simply get torn off and the surface smoothed out by the mechanism operation - essentially the weapon is self-cleaning to a degree, operation grinding the rust off.
There is a soviet russia joke somewhere in there...

Collect, snoop in, use own resources to decrypt - sure.
Damage security of products manufactured by independent, private 3rd party companies, force them to release broken security products and market them as secure - now that's really assinine.

The problem is this requires enormous investment in hardware that will be useless afterwards. I doubt there are many entities willing to invest that much into killing Bitcoin.

Once existence of such cartel is known, the value of bitcoin would plummet right to the bottom.

The cartel would be able to produce disproportionate amounts of worthless currency.

Note wealth in BTC you have is [number of BTC you own] x [price of BTC in USD]. You could cheat the first but as result you'll destroy the second. You'll be stuck with tons of useless hardware that cost millions of real money, and a bunch of useless data signifying you have a lot of worthless currency.

Moreover, the "big players" of the market know this already. Any bets why the manufacturers of BTC ASIC hardware sell it instead of earning BTC on their own farms? The answer is spreading the computing power keeps BTC healthy and exchange rates high. They prefer to get some cash directly, from sale of hardware, than to try to earn that much in BTC, create impression that they dominate the market, and have the prices collapse.

Cheating at this game costs all, but it costs the cheater the most.

Lockheed failed to pay = finalize the contract that would obligate the contractor to destroy these backups. What they consent or not consent to is moot, the guy was in a separate company, the company delivered a product and wasn't paid for it. That means Lockheed doesn't own any IP to that product (which apparently doesn't stop them from manufacturing it).