Not sure I understand all your question, but I'll try to answer them.
1- You can dump tickets from your console. Being disc or eshop, it will be there.
Danger of brick ? YES ! this tool is still in heavy development, bad use of fw.bin can brick !
Attention, Dumped ticket from an eShop game will have the ConsoleID inside and will work only on that console. sharing it will not be useful.
2- connect to eshop, see if it's marked as "re-download" or "buy".
if it lets you re-download the game, it was eShop version.
If you have a disc of that game, it's obviously a disc.
if you don't have a disc .... did you usually sell your games? if not, if you don't have a disc, it was a eshop version.
I don't understand why you don't know which version you bought. disc or eshop, how many games did you buy?
3- as long as there's no new update released by nintendo, you don't need to worry about being on latest version without protection.
what you need to worry about, is that if nintendo release a new update, and you removed your protection, the console WILL update before you knew about it.
So, keep the protection!
4- hmm, yes. no need to be online to play. network is needed only to run homebrew launcher. there are completely offline methods (android).
5- there's no silent update.
It's an update that nintendo release while you don't have a protection and your console download without telling you.
it's not "silent", it's the way it works. it's just you without a protection.
the system will not update without wifi, or without a working internet connection.
So if I'm reading this right, this means we can dump the title.tik from our disc games, modify it, and use the modified title.tik to install and run that same game from a USB HDD?
Yes ! as long as your game exists on eShop because you need the encrypted .app files to install it with WUP installer.
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