although the direct download server on electrum.org seems to be back up, i have added the torrent file to my Seedr, hope it helps with the download speed.
always make sure to verify the signature of the wallet file you download before running it

when you don't check that checkbox and use a password, what happens is that Electrum encrypts your sensitive data inside your wallet file. things such as your private keys (in case it is an imported wallet) and seed. you can even open this wallet in a text editor and see the human readable content which is a properly formatted JSON. which is why when you open Electrum it doesn't ask you any passwords and you can see the history and addresses, balance,... but when you want to spend it asks for password.

when you check that checkbox, Electrum encrypts everything instead, the whole wallet file. if you open it in a text editor you see an encrypted string. that is why when you open this wallet Electrum needs the password so it asks you to enter your password so it can read the file.


obviously yes! it can be a simple keylogger stealing your password or a more complicated malware that steals your coins.
solution? use cold storage or a hardware wallet.

true, we have seen time and time again that after a rise like this there is a correction of about 10-15% drop. which we may also see here. but only in case $10,000 is reached this month not 6 months from now!!

and the big "crashes" like 30% or so drop only happen whenever there is some kind of drama going on. last one was the "bitcoin is dead and BCH will replace it because S2X is dead"-drama. the previous big one was the "UASF will split bitcoin and it will die"-drama. i don't know anything that is coming to us now though!

also i disagree with #3, there are already "market makers" who have somewhat control of the market. where do you think all these shakeouts come from?

the point of storing your seed on a paper is to store it on something that is NOT digital for security reasons.
your computer, cell phone, USB disk,...
- all can be stolen. specially small (portable) ones such as a cell phone or USB disk. a thief will most probably not know what the value of a piece of paper is but he surely knows what an iPhone is worth!
- they can be hacked, of course this can be prevented by encryption and being offline.
- and finally the issue that people usually forget: digital mediums can also be damaged. paper can degrade, so does your USB. but in case of digital storage they lose data and if that happens you won't have access to your money.

a safety deposit box is a good idea if you have a large amount of money stored in bitcoin.
but remember that storing your seed doesn't have to mean a piece of paper labeled "My Bitcoin Seed worth billions" and be in your drawer! be more creative. write it down in a book, in different pages. you may even be able to find the words in each page and circle them

it is purely speculation, there are actually a topic in this board with a better speculation about this.

that is not called "lost forever" as your title suggests. that is always accessible and ready to be used with just one click. if so these holders choose.

just holding does not increase the price. the increasing demand is increasing the price. more people buy, more money comes in, price goes higher.

if it was just because of holding, all the altcoins would have been worth millions of dollars because they have too many bag holders.

when you want to compare bitcoin fees with altcoins the question is, can they keep their fee low if the circumstances were the same?
and the answer is no.

first of all most of them won't even be able to handle the amount of transactions that bitcoin is handling on a daily basis.
secondly when their blocks become full and if by a dim chance they were worth $9000+ then their fees would be the same as bitcoin and in some cases even more.

there are times when selling bitcoin is not a bad idea at all. you don't have to sell everything the same way you don't have to go all in! for example there are times you need money, you can sell some small portion like 10% to get that money and enjoy your long term profit.
there are also times when you speculate a drop, like back when the BCH drama started during the SegWit2x cancellation. and then by doing that you will have more money to buy back at the bottom and have more bitcoin.

checking the checksums is not enough. you must verify the signature of the file versus the public key of the person releasing them.

also the issue with this way of releasing is that it is easily hackeable. i don't know what fyoki did this but he should have released his pubkey elsewhere not in same place as github. you put it on a key server and then only put the signatures on the repository.

for now use the pubkey https://github.com/fyookball/keys-n-hashes/blob/master/pubkeys/jonaldkey2.txt
and use it to verify the signature https://github.com/fyookball/keys-n-hashes/blob/master/sigs-and-sums/2.9.4/win-linux/Electron-Cash-2.9.4.exe.sig

just checking hashes is not safe.

they are probably safe. but if you want to be safe, you should always separate these things from each other and have them all in a cold storage (offline computer).
you can always use a live Linux (eg. running it from a DVD), restore your wallet from your seed that you have written on a paper, make your transactions then shut down and remove that DVD.

not all airdrops are the same. for instance some of them give you a reward for the amount of coins that you hold, which is usually based on how much bitcoin you own.
for example you get 1 airdrop coin for every 1 bitcoin you own. 1:1 like bitcore (BTX), or you get a different ratio like Byteball 1:0.06 IIRC.
or sometimes it is a reward based on how much of that coin you own for example Byteball gives you a reward based on both bitcoin and GBYTE that you own.

all is currently happening on Coinbase. price is already at $9047 as i am writing this while it is at least $200 lower on other exchanges!

as i said before this rally is because of the CME news about their addition of a new futures market for bitcoin. and CME being in US and coinbase also being in US means there is a much bigger demand there than on other exchanges.
if you remember a while ago they released something about having 1 million new users in a couple of days or something like that...

sadly all the Reddit bitcoin boards are useless now. it has been a while that i've seen something worth wasting time to read over there.
r/bitcoin is either a twitter feed or calling r/btc a total shit
r/btc is either saying how BCH is growing or calling r/bitcoin a total shit and censorship

sadly reddit is one of those places that attracts lots of users, mostly newcomers who are exposed to all this nonsense instead of learning more about bitcoin!

lets say that Satoshi did dump his coins, 1 million is going to be eaten up by the market like there is no tomorrow! then the price recovers again in about a week, or 1 month tops and we are back where we are now. on the rise to the moon without the "fear of 1 million satoshi stash". the price would rise even faster.

now lets assume we killed bitcoin and started from scratch, what is stopping the new coin to go the same way bitcoin went? nothing! the same idiots are going to switch over and the same history will be repeated.

this only shows that you either don't understand what are the things that are going on, or you want bitcoin to drop so you can buy more!

check out Bit-Wasp
source: https://github.com/Bit-Wasp/bitcoin-php
ANN: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=453395.0

if this for something like asking for payment from users, you generate your Seed in a safe location away from your server and just put your MPK (the master public key) on the server, and it generates a new address for your users each time you want. and you have the same addresses with keys where you stored your seed.

they advertised a lot.
for example back when poloniex was small and Cryptsy was big (this is back when polo had a good support team and respected their customers), polo did a lot of advertisement, they even had a page for "giveaways" where they put some free coins there and also allowed coin developers to add their tokens there in case they wanted to give some away. and "free money" always attracts more people.

there is also C.A.T bot https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=507103.0
and also Gekko which is free and seems pretty decent: https://github.com/askmike/gekko

but unfortunately i have never used any of these bots to give you any feedback based on experience. each of these have some features but lack some others. and they are expensive in my opinion.

i write my own bot, even though i am not an expert in programming but i get the features i want.

with a single click, No!
but most of the trading bots that i have seen support multiple exchanges and have their API at the ready. you just have to change tab or something and click sell on each of them to execute a different order for every exchange. you may have to pay different for each API though to get the keys from the developer of the bot!

you know what the funniest part of all these forks is?

... it is the fact that most of them increase the block size
as if their useless token is going to be used so much that it will require bigger blocksize!
bitcoin diamond: 8 MB block size
bitcoin silver: 30 sec block interval which is somewhat the same thing
bitcore (BTX): 10 MB with 2.5 min block interval

and surprise surprise none of them ever surpass 100-200 kB block size...

i don't think this time the resistance for $10,000 is as big as the previous big resistance we saw at $1000. it will be a lot less because the first one at $1000 was a little different due to the fact that it has happened before back in 2013 and everyone was secretly thinking that is it. the end of the line. that automatically created some sell off there.

i also remember all the ridiculous technical analysis back at that time saying this second $1000 this year is forming a "head and shoulders" pattern!

because replace by fee is not supported by the whole network.

the way replace by fee works is that first you make a transaction in a way that you tell everyone that you may replace this transaction by increasing its fee. it is like a flag on your tx.
but when you increase the fee, in reality you are creating a new transaction, signing it again, and even get a new and different hash (tx id).

as i said some nodes still do not support it, which means when you send your new tx some of them see it as a double spend and ignore that "flag" so they keep the old one. some of them that support RBF, see that flag, drop the old one and place the new tx in their mempool.

now we have some nodes not supporting RBF which have your old tx, and some nodes that do support RBF which have your new tx. a block explorer should list all these transactions not just one. so they do and their system recognizes this as a double spend just because there are two different transactions.

well, seed has changed quite a bit actually. BIP39 was not available when Electrum came out (2 years) so there was a specific way of getting the seed.
all the versions before 2.0 have been using this method and they all have 12 words instead of the new 13.

there is no need. wallets are backward compatible meaning he can use his old seed in the new versions and the wallet will still recognize and generate all his keys.

the issue as you said is most probably with spelling.
here is the wordlist:
https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/blob/master/lib/wordlist/english.txt
check to see which word you are getting wrong.