generally speaking, based on the interactions that i have with many people regarding bitcoin, i see majority of people are concerned about all these debates and the internal "war" that is going on. it has slowed the progress drastically.
they are scared when they hear all these acronyms that people passionately use and all the risks they are talking about.
and that is a lot of money (in total) that we are talking about! and it is waiting to come in... they just need a glimmer of hope...

thanks for the answers.
as for the linux, i am new to it too. but i am using Ubuntu because it was most popular and i could easily find any help i want about anything just by searching. all my problems have been asked and the answers were always available as fast as me just typing it in google. but there is nothing wrong with using any other distros

for your second question i have to say the easiest way seems to be using a hardware wallet (if you are willing to pay).
and again for this (since i won't ever pay for a wallet) i am using an installed electrum on my USB disk which has a Ubuntu on it.

yeah, well i mostly believe that round numbers such as the $2000 have always been a big psychological barriers. people always have these numbers as a price to sell above while it is not yet reached and they also have it as a target to buy under when price is above it and has a chance of dropping. and that usually makes a bigger resistance than normal.

i am all for telling others to run a full node but you don't need a full node for "broadcasting" a transaction to bitcoin network. there  are so many easier and newbie friendlier ways.
and i actually think using core as a cold storage is much complicated than using eletrum (which is an SPV wallet).

this is by far the best thing i have seen in a long time. and it seems like the news is already spreading at the speed of light throughout the internet.
#ToTheMoon #ANewHero
http://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/12/someone-held-up-a-buy-bitcoin-sign-during-yellens-testimony-to-congress.html
http://www.coindesk.com/buy-bitcoin-sign-raised-feds-janet-yellen-testifies-congress/
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/one-clear-message-received-from-janet-yellens-testimony-buy-bitcoin-2017-07-12
http://forextv.com/bitcoin-news/someone-held-up-a-buy-bitcoin-sign-during-yellens-testimony-to-congress/

and link to the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ga3maNZ0x0w
but you have to find the exact timing in the comments since this is live broadcast but is about -2 hours from the time of this post.

... and now i have an avatar

the only "common" way is to receive fewer number of transactions. for example if you are receiving payments or buying bitcoin and transferring it to your wallet, do it in bigger batches when it accumulates not in small amounts.

wallets don't receive the fees, the miners do and the network determines how much fee you should pay. however the effect a wallet has is that some of them do a good job at giving you the best estimated fee and some of them don't.
i know two of them that do it well from personal experience: bitcoin core and electrum.

you can also take a look at these links for more information regarding fees and current number of unconfirmed transactions:
http://bitcoinfees.21.co/
https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#2w
https://bitcoinfees.github.io/

this topic in the beginners and help section which was written by theymos may help with your confusion (i think it should be stickied in that board at least): https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2012799.0

feel free to say thank you there to bump it ^.^

why Tails? (genuine question and i would love to hear why you chose it)
i mean Tails is a linux distribution aiming to have no kind of persistence data stored. and you are trying to use it with persistence and as a cold storage! there are a lot more options which are also better. use one of the lighter distros or something.

also why are you concerned about the long process of spending bitcoin?
a cold storage by definition is used when you don't want to access the funds every day. for example you want to store the coins for long term. in which case you rarely want to access it for spending and that long and hard process will be performed once or twice every 6 months for example.
and for pocket money you use a hot wallet. a secondary wallet on your desktop containing a small amount for spending.

we all know that this dip is because of the fear of August 1st and the possibility of a chain split because of the deadline that BIP148 has set.
while many believe that BIP148 is going to fail, i say although it will fail but it is not a failure. the best result of it was the SegWit2x which currently has 91% of the miners support. whereas BIP141 (SegWit) has 46% support.

now the speculation.

i say we are going to have SegWit activated on August 1st by SegWit2x (which needs only 80% support and now has 91% support) and that will lead to a big price recovery and another bull run.
we saw the same thing about activation of SegWit on litecoin. they delayed the activation as much as possible, also caused a big dip after LTC's big rise and then it was activated with nearly 100% support and price jumped another time.

this following chart is happening all over again. this is the same fear. the fear of a hard fork and a split. the difference is that the picture below was because of BU split and now it is the SegWit split. and both of them are because of drama and had a very small chance of coming to reality.



i will expect $3000 be broken if things go as planned. buy the dips then

but it will probably only last about 4-5 months until the second deadline which will be 6 months after activation of SegWit (in 2018). and we may see another one of these.

now by that time either SegWit has lived up to the promise (and it is good enough time to see) and they give up on the 2MB hard fork or we will see the drama all over again over hard forking to a 2 MB base block size.

this doesn't make any sense! do you have any reference or more information about this.
as far as i can tell, the only thing you can "place" in the bitcoin blockchain is a short hex string using the OP_Return. how can a string be recognized as a virus?!

BIP148 is not a solution to increase block size, it is a User Activated Soft Fork which is set up to activate SegWit on a given date (August 1) because it wasn't activated with the hashrate support, this is more like forcing miners to activate it or be rejected if they don't.
i believe you are confusing the SegWit2x and the 2MB hard fork with BIP148

for starters bitcoin price can not always go up, it needs to come down too and then stop at some level and stabilize there. we had that at $2500.
and for now it seems like the "split panic" is dominating the market and causing the drop for the time being. and this is not the first time we get this type of panic after a big rise. looking at the history of bitcoin it is filled with moments like this.

that doesn't exactly answer my question though.
go to http://statoshi.info/dashboard/db/memory-pool and set the dates to
this is the most recent period of time (more than a day) with no spam attack and a clean and nearly generic transactions
you can see what i mean when i say in reality it will take only a couple of minutes to fill the 1MB+ block if not already above 1 MB!

i still find the insisting part on the 2 MB fork this soon very weird and unnecessary because the current 1 MB is enough without the spam attack and with activation of SegWit it will be more than enough. but that is another discussion for another time and another place 

if by this you mean the button stays disabled (grey) then i can only think of two possibilities:
1. you are typing the seed wrong, whether you are confusing one word with another or some spelling error, or you have written it down incorrectly.
to fix this take a look at this (https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/blob/master/lib/wordlist/english.txt) and see which word you are typing wrong.

2. the tails electrum was not the real electrum and you used a modified fake version (this is very unlikely) but unless you have verified the signatures of the downloaded tails and you are sure you created the wallet in a safe environment, i would  consider this possibility.

this percentages are different on different proposals! (you may want to double check the following numbers)
SegWit is at >95%
Segwit2x is at >80%
BU some people say 75% but i think it doesn't have any.

and support is not just the hashrate, they are signalling on blocks. the overwhelming support is everyone who is involved with bitcoin. miners, developers, users, nodes, economy, ...
you can see examples of some of them here: https://coin.dance/poli

EDIT: let me rephrase this question here
i fail to understand what the drama is all about.
the fork only needs  1 block to happen, and this one block can be delayed a little bit (a couple of minutes tops) before being mined. then the rest of the blocks building on top of it can be from nearly 0 (empty block with only coinbase tx) to 2 MB.

so where is the problem with that?

and please not that my question is not about why fork to 2 MB part, my question is about this issue and all the confused drama about it when it is pretty simple.

there are a lot of things wrong with bitcoin unlimited but what you said is not it. any fork can lead to a split and 2 different coins. it has little to do with it being hard fork or soft fork and mostly it has to do with the amount of support they can get.

if any fork has the "overwhelming support" then there won't be any splits (like the previous hard fork that bitcoin had) and if it doesn't have that support then there will be a split like BIP148 which is a soft fork.

how would you know?
for all you know OP may have sold his coins above $2800 off the market to someone who was thirsty for getting in and had no other way of doing so.

he may even be from India in which case the price is super high there and it doesn't matter where you sell it is not a dip!

yes bitcoin can continue to function without SegWit and if it never activates it wouldn't be the end of the world either.

but with SegWit a lot of things will change. there are lots of benefits that we will get because of it.
the most obvious one that everyone is looking forward to is the capacity increase and the Malleability Fixes. [1]
also there is all the befits of lightning network which you can read here [2] [3]

in other words if we want to improve for the future we need it.

[1] https://bitcoincore.org/en/2016/01/26/segwit-benefits/
[2] https://lightning.network/
[3] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Lightning_Network

this is one of the bigger fears in the market this year because there is really a possibility for a fork and then a split on the way unlike the previous times which were just pure FUD.  selling was a good idea but like always you had to act fast to sell while price was high, the more it goes down the riskier it gets to sell because it is closer to the bottom where you should buy not sell!

this means any sell above $2430 was a good choice.