your transaction is spending an unconfirmed transaction which is spending an unconfirmed transaction which is .... that goes as long as 4 other unconfirmed transactions creating a chain of them, 5 in total. the previous 4 transactions need to be confirmed first before your transaction can be confirmed.

checking fee of each of them, shows they are paying 100 satoshi/byte. the issue is that currently there are over 200,000 other transactions in the mempool waiting to be confirmed and most of them are paying a lot higher fee than these ones (440 s/b to be high priority now). which me ans miners won't choose these txs over the high paying ones.

you can read this: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1802212.0
but as a receiver there is not much you can do.

there is actually a lot of things stopping you from performing a successful arbitrage with bitcoin:
1. this https://blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions which is currently at 220,000 unconfirmed transactions! and you will be withdrawing from an exchange and who knows what fee are they going to pay and how long would that even take!

2. sometimes there is a good reason for the price difference. for example, the exchange may have a high fee (trading or deposit or withdrawal or all) so the price lags behind. or for example it is higher because of the deposit methods that it has such as $1000-$2000 higher prices on yobit which has weird deposit methods!
not to mention the matter of trust. some exchanges can not be trusted at all. and some of them are in other countries which you can not even deposit any money there. for example it is at $20k in India but good luck getting any money in there!

start here: https://bitcoin.org/en/getting-started
it has the basic information that you need to know and also it helps with choosing your wallet. you can read the topics on top of this board (sticky) for more information.

there is also this: https://www.coindesk.com/information/how-does-blockchain-technology-work/
that i find helpful. there is also some additional links (questions) at the bottom which will be helpful.

it is impossible to tell really. the rally is strong, and money keeps pouring in without any stop or even slow down. who knows we may see it in less than a week.
it is not good though. i have always said in the past 3 years that a slow but solid rise is always a lot better than a huge but fast rise which is weak. they can cause a bear market that lasts long. and nobody wants that.

it is funny how nobody cared
if it was any other time or maybe any other big place that was hacked, price may have reacted but not tot this...

obviously never that. altcoins drop if bitcoin drops.
but on the other hand these altcoins have been getting dumped hard for the past couple of days, each losing 10-20%. that means many will bottom out and get ready for a launch. if i see something getting pumped i may join in.

the funny thing about start of a drop is that it doesn't even have to be a big news like the things in your poll. it sometimes doesn't even have to have anything to do with bitcoin for the drop to begin! it is all in the FUD and how many newbies aka weak hands are in the market at that particular time and how high the price has gone in the current rally.

the last time i laughed my ass off was when China banned ICOs and the FUD started coming out saying bitcoin was banned and price dropped! then about a month later then closed exchanges and not much happened to price...

right now the FOMO needs to end and rise has to simply slow down, and a simple "bitcoin is bubble" FUD can cause the panic sell and a big drop.

but there are other countries with much higher prices like this too. what can you explain about them? for example price was above $20k in India and someone said it is above $20k in Zimbabwe too but i didn't check it myself. these countries like India have no war or anything, they are just buying because the demand has been increasing with a high speed. and also it is partly due to panic buying that people are now "scared of missing the boat" because they have been waiting for a couple of years and seeing price go up from $200 to $10,000 so they don't want to make the same mistake again but they are making another mistake now!

i think we will end 2017 with an unbelievable price record which is possibly above $20k to begin with and in 2018 $40k is just a small 2x rise so i say it is possible but the problem is, when price is rising like this, meaning too fast and with no proper correction, a bubble is forming up.
you can see me say there is no bubble all year long to everyone who called it but now this is all different. up to $8000 and even until $10,000 it was a solid rise, even though it seemed big and fast to many. and that is what always stays because it has a strong support behind it. but ever since $10,000 the price is getting crazy. this in my opinion is more of a panic buying instead of a solid rise. and this kind of rise is not known to stay for long.

@nc50lc
the second website you listed here is an absolute scam. and it is super easy to verify it if you check the signature which is provided with the download files.
i did a quick check of the Electrum-3.0.0.tar.gz file for Linux with the provided signature file which turned out to be a fake one.

please note that i already have ThomasV's public key which is 0x2BD5824B7F9470E6 stored on my OS.

see the "good signature" for the real one. and "Bad signature" warning for the fake one:

the wallets don't matter, the fee is determined based on the network and size of your transaction. and you are receiving a lot of payments. they are not that small though. each worth nearly $30.
the only (safe) option is to do what you did here, send with a small fee and wait until it is confirmed.

there is a riskier option which works best for smaller transactions. and that is using a third party wallet. like using exchanges if you are a trader. you receive your funds in their wallet, you can even trade with those and make profit and when it is accumulated to a bigger amount, you make a withdrawal.
although you should do some calculations first. for example in this tx you shared you have paid a 2.5 S/B fee or 0.0002BTC but it will be stuck. withdrawal fee of exchanges is usually 0.001BTC and above! but it won't have the being stuck issue.

my hope is that the drop, dump or panic sell starts now. if it does happen now, it will be a big dump like it always is. going down, 30% at most. which will have $9500-$10000 as its bottom and we can then establish a nice support level there before any further rise.

but if it continues on this path reaching higher price in a month or two like reaching $50k, then it will officially be 2013 all over again. and we may see the follow up long bear market too.

there is not much you can do! these are not regulated exchanges and it is a hard and long process to start a lawsuit against them, specially if the money you invested for trading on that exchange is not huge it won't be worth the hassle. and that is how they scam you!

and there are no legit exchanges apart from decentralized exchanges that have no third party to begin with. just recently one of the biggest altcoin exchanges called bittrex scammed thousands of their users and stole their money

you are thinking about it wrong. there are 21 million whole bitcoins but also there is 8 decimals after the 1 whole bitcoin. which means there are 2,100,000,000,000,000 satoshi available and if you think about it, that amount is more than enough for the number of people who might be interested in bitcoin and want to use it. it will never be every single person on earth so it is enough.

and with the value of bitcoin rising with more adoption, 1 satoshi will have a meaningful value. currently at $0.00014

this is one of those times when i stop speculating about bitcoin. i already have my coins in cold storage and i will be standing on the side just watching. possibly selling some small amount which i always use for trading in case i sense the rise is at an end. other than that i prefer not to think about it much because it is impossible to predict anymore.

i can explain the rise to some extent but not even i am convinced!

it is impossible to say without having additional information. here are the steps you should take:
1. make sure your transaction is confirmed.
go to a block explorer like https://blockchain.info/ and search for your transaction ID. now see if it is confirmed or not. if it is not, then your Electrum is telling you the same. read this about stuck transactions: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1802212.0 in short you can try something like https://pool.viabtc.com/tools/txaccelerator/ to get it confirmed faster.

2. if it is not confirmed make sure your Electrum is connected to internet and it is done receiving.
click on that green circle. you should see this number (https://blockchain.info/q/getblockcount) which is currently at 497,845. if you don't you have to select another server and let it sync. the issue should be fixed that way.

it is not version related, and you don't need seed or private key or recovery or anything. this error simply means there has been some problem with your communication with the Electrum Node (the server) that you are connected to.

possible reasons? you have connectivity issues on your end. the server may have gone down or was not listening for incoming tx messages when you tried broadcasting.

solution? simply change server! it usually happens automatically when Electrum fails to communicate with the servers.

workaround? use the Preview window and instead of clicking "Broadcast" click on "Copy". this will copy your signed transaction to clipboard (you can paste it in a text file to see what it is). now go to any of these https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction_broadcasting paste your transaction hex there and push it.

it depends on what you mean by "verified the exe with signature" and what you mean by "not verified"!

you have to verify the PGP signature of the .exe you have downloaded using https://www.gpg4win.org/ for windows or use a Linux distro with GnuPG installed.
and the verification should indicate that it has found a "good signature" with a warning that the public key is not in your trusted list. you can ignore the warning but you need to see the "good signature" result.

we have already had one correction after the push past $11,000 where price dropped properly below $10k even. it is impossible to see a correction every  day when the same price is reached! currently price is headed up, and as you can see today, it already past $12,000 too. now you can start thinking about a correction although the rise was tiny because it was less than a 10% rise.

i personally believe we will see the correction when we see $13k, either breaks above it and comes down or tries to break it and comes down. anyways there is a $200 wiggle room there before the correction starts.

it is like walking into a shop in US and want to pay with Zimbabwe dollar instead of dollar that everyone else is using.
when it comes to altcoin trading, majority of people are doing it to increase their bitcoin holdings. so they all trade with bitcoin to make profit on that also. this means for any altcoin the BTC market is more popular than anything else.
you still have other options, you can buy most of the big coins with fiat directly. there are multiple exchanges that have the altcoin/USD, altcoin/EUR,  ... listed which you can use.

pros? maybe if you want to start without having bitcoin you can skip a step and pay 1 less trading fee. it is not that big, so it is not such a pro!
cons? you will have to go to a specific exchange that has that market, not all of them have it. so your options is limited. you can't buy all the altcoins with everything you want. and as i said these markets are less popular, not all of them but in most cases you may even see less liquidity.

you and your "Chinese insider" that you quote are missing some major point

1. exchanges were banned but people were still able to withdraw all their money and bitcoin from those exchanges to move them elsewhere and they did do that. they moved it to cold storage, back to fiat, other exchanges such as Japanese exchanges and other USD ones, P2P trading like localbitcoins,... and if you checked those places you could have seen the rise in their volume which showed the migration.
in other words the supply you have in mind just went to some other places.
also these exchanges such as Huobi, OkCoin are still open and operational. they just don't accept Chinese banks anymore

2. you are simply ignoring the rest of the world and focusing on 1 country! and we are talking about 8 billion dollar trading volume every day. without China!
and you seem to have forgotten that Chinese exchanges were reporting a huge fake volume that vanished as soon as PBoC said they want to investigate them and their fees went up from 0%

right now bitcoin is not exactly considered a payment method aka a currency. it doesn't matter what the fees are, even when they were 1 US cent it was not considered as a currency by majority of people.
that is sad because the only reason why bitcoin has value is because it is a currency, but since bitcoin price continues rising people want it more as an investment than a  currency. nobody cares about the high fees when they make a lot of profit every day. when you buy $100 worth of bitcoin and your $100 is worth $130 in a couple of weeks, you don't mind paying a $4 fee even for purchases.

additionally the merchants mostly have bitcoin as a secondary option that is not used that often.
maybe in a couple of years with more stability, hopefully some solution for scaling and more adoption we can see shops and people treat bitcoin more as a currency. only then you can start thinking about the "hidden fees" you mentioned here and do some different calculation, so for example those who pay with bitcoin receive some sort of discount.