the coin or bitcoin is not a physical thing like fiat to transfer from one place to another.
a bitcoin wallet is a place to keep they keys. these keys are used to spend bitcoin, bitcoin which exists in form of transaction outputs stored on the blockchain and blockchain is held by every person around the world who is running a full node client.

so in short you keep the keys on Ledger or paper wallet, etc and then use that key for spending which is known as creating a transaction and signing it.

(i hope i didn't make it more confusing)

no it won't if he used a multisignature address!
Litecoin used to have the same version field (which resulted in multi signature addresses start with 3) as bitcoin so it is possible to send LTC to BTC address and vice versa and don't get any errors. because it is a valid address.

they changed this to "M" recently though. but the old addresses will remain valid forever!

since these two use the same method of creating an address they both have the same private keys in code level so you have a hope of recovering it.

most of these cases that lost bitcoin one way or another have bought back, at least all the people i know of have done that so they are still hodlers even though they lost something.
i wasn't born yet by the time of gox but i have lost bitcoin in cryptsy and some shitcoins i've invested in but i have bought more coins and made more profit than i have ever lost so the ration shouldn't be that big.

only a properly created cold storage or a trusted hardware wallet.
you can search for some hardware wallets if you are not tech savvy or don't want to bother learning how tos and if you are willing to pay. things such as Trezor or Ledger nano would work.

or you can learn more about cold storage and do it yourself easily. like creating a paper wallet with tools such as https://github.com/pointbiz/bitaddress.org or make a Trezor like cold storage on your USB disk yourself

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Cold_storage

[sarcasm mode: on]
this is the most rational argument i have ever heard. ethereum will replace bitcoin soon, we will go to ethereum and pay $1.5 per transaction instead of paying what OP paid ($2) and if the eth tx fee trend continues on this path we will soon pay $21 per transaction in 3 months (another 1300% rise).

lets all switch to ethereum right now, transactions are so cheap



https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/ethereum-transactionfees.html#3m

no.
because simply two things will happen in the far future that you are thinking about:
- either we get an scaling solution and there is enough block size to include all the transactions in it, so fees will come down the same ways they came down from being 0.01BTC back when price was $10
- or people will stop using bitcoin and blocks will be empty again and again fees will come down because there is no competition.

interesting project. just some thoughts that i wanted to share:

first of all as far as i know and the wiki says, "Transaction expiration"[1] is never going to happen. in other words when you send a transaction it will stay out there for ever, most probably.
i currently have a transaction with zero fees that is out there for more than 1.5 month

also on top of that the maximum mempool expiry time was increased to 2 weeks [2] so transaction aren't going to be forgotten that easily.

also why did you choose 6 hours

[1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction_expiration
[2] https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commit/a72f76ca3d5d2f259d308f65810891389f728e9e

those who have ever seen a bitcoin chart and looked closely to the similar dips know these dips are always good time to buy and they never last long, at least their bottom never does. and this recent bottom was $2480 and didn't last more than 15 minutes! and that is a free and easy 12% profit with current price ($2770) and with the future rise it will be more.

just to add to what kolloh said you can always do everything manually.
apart from selecting the outputs to spend (coins tab) you can always manually tell the wallet where to send the funds. for example you can select pay to many from Tools menu and then type it like this:

also remember to always click preview button to see the transaction before sending, it is a good habit for double checking.

... mostly towards newcomers

i see an increased activity in people advertising altcoins as good investments which are going to be such and such in the future and do wonderful things! specially in the main board. and it is only going to increase as the bubble of said altcoin grows bigger.

just remember to think before investing in any of them, don't fall for the emotional hype.

also a good idea to educate yourself. start by reading this: http://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/bubble.asp

if you truely understand the meaning of open source project then you will easily see that knowing who wrote that code has little importance. the code itself and the technology that it introduced to the world however is of much more importance.

and OP made a deposit into his poloniex account yesterday of 1 month ago!
take a look at the time of the posts before quoting and answering them, by that time Poloniex had a lot of problems because of all the altcoin pumps and all the traffic it was getting. now they claimed they have added additional servers and the pumps have slowed down, that is why you have no more problems.

the question is who was the first person to betray us and say satoshi is "one hundred millionth part of a bitcoin" instead of saying bitcoin is "one hundred million times of a satoshi".

you see at code level there is nothing called bitcoin. there is only satoshi, it is a int64_t if i am not mistaken and then everything else is just user interface.

also read this: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Satoshi_(unit)#History

the economical collapse prediction is nothing new. i don't know why they still do it! it is always the same thing and it never happens (fortunately or not).
and no people won't start moving their savings to bitcoin because bitcoin is not the only thing out there that is considered safe haven, there are lots of things such as Gold,... which people trust more or know more than they know and trust bitcoin. but there will be a growth in demand for bitcoin for sure.

check your "blockchain_headers" file and see if the file size is growing or not.
the file is located 1 directory above where your wallet file is located.
On Mac:
Open Finder
Go to folder (shift+cmd+G) and type ~/.electrum
http://docs.electrum.org/en/latest/faq.html#where-is-my-wallet-file-located

the file size should be 35.79 MB at first (downloaded from Electrum.org server) and then grow to 35.9 MB (37,675,008 bytes to be exact by the time of writing this). if it is not then it means you are not downloading the file needed for that "Synchronising..." status to go away. so check your internet connection and firewall.

you can also check your network window and see if it shows this number or not.

try looking around for a little and see other people asking the same question each time price rises. the answer for bitcoin is always the same, it is a good investment but it is not risk free.

as for Aug 1 we don't know what will happen, and large dip is not "general thought" of investors, you have been reading some FUD.

as for your main question look at this way:
bitcoin:
has real demand.
people invest in it as a store of value, as a strong technology that has been working perfectly without any problems for 8 years.
it has a solid developing team. the code is reviewed and it is bug free.
hackers have been trying to hack bitcoin, attack the network, ... for 8 freaking years and they have never succeeded.
people are also buying bitcoin because it has real world usage as a currency. you can buy almost anything with it these days. there are thousands of merchants accepting it. there are 200,000 merchants in Japan alone.
countries have either embraced bitcoin as a legal method of payment or are thinking about it

ethereum
it is centralized, don't expect any change that community wants but expect any change that the developers feel like it. hint: DAO roll back, Difficulty bomb, Change of POW,...
has no real demand apart from speculators, idiots who are forced to buy ETH tokens to invest that in ICOs
it has not been around for long, it has lots of bugs and exploits.
it has a terrible scaling issue which has led to $1 transaction fees even with fast (15 second) blocks and no backlog like bitcoin has!!!
running a full node is extremely hard and much more expensive than bitcoin and that leads to more centralization and lack of nodes as time goes by.
it is not even a currency! it is a platform for smart contracts and it is not doing it well enough a better platform can easily replace it. some even believe RSK will do that soon.

maybe good is not the correct word to use here. Desktop wallets are better than Web Wallets. because the wallet will be located on your desktop and chances of a hacker trying to hack an individual is less than a hacker trying to hack the website/server containing all the wallets (phishing attacks, ... to get your password to that website for example).

what is best is cold storage. where you cut all the access to your wallet from the outside world.

as as it was said, with all wallets you have private keys, they are the only thing that you need to spend funds. if you don't see them, it is by design to prevent confusion for newcomers who may not fully grasp the importance of securing their private keys and may give that to others instead of their public key.

two things will change as time goes by and they will lead to a more stable price and smaller fluctuations.
1- more adoption: which means more demand and more people trading bitcoin also.
2- bitcoin exchanges become bigger: which means the orderbooks will be packed with buy and sell orders and selling a large amount or buying the same won't change the price drastically.

and it is happening already if you compare the fluctuations and the orderbook sizes with 3 years ago, or 5 years ago for example.

yes it will on both cases but the problem is that they will face the ugly truth after the transition to other cryptocurrencies. the truth that most of these altcoins are pump and dump schemes with lots of things wrong with them.
and also the ugly truth that most of them have terrible issues with scaling. some of them even are going to have much higher fees than bitcoin if used more than just for trading.

http://www.investopedia.com/ is like the encyclopedia for trading, it also has some good stuff on bitcoin trading. what you need to know is that bitcoin trading is not that different from regular trading, it is the same in a smaller market/smaller scale. so try googling general topics about trading and try using Youtube to find some videos and watch them.
there is also http://www.tradingview.com/ which has some good analysis from people sharing them.