Great responses. Thanks.

I will need to investigate further to get my head around it.
But, if this is people basically betting on the price in the future, then they are not really influencing the price, unless of course they are betting and also buying HUGE amounts of bitcoin, creating an artificial scarcity, driving the price up.
OR by dumping a huge amount on the market, possibly driving the price down.

Does that sound like I'm in the right ball park?

I don't think its even got started yet.
It has to correct at some point though and I think there will be a big drop in value, but will recover over the long term.

Thanks for your response.
So, I'm guessing the CBOE would have been loading up with Bitcoin prior to 10th Dec. The demand driving prices up?

I don't fully understand the Futures market.
How could futures impact bitcoin and its price?

Status: 0/unconfirmed
Date: 14/06/2016 12:59
To: Send to  wallet 1ESz2tJ35T1VU9KA2JHHTjXEuWhP9Xgqj2
Debit: -0.01065500 BTC
Net amount: -0.01065500 BTC
Transaction ID: 3797806a3b79df6588222329c1641809577506a796f8cbc0dc4d67a3b857b678-000

As you can see, I sent the above on 14/06/16 and still have no confirmations to date.
I am using Bitcoin Core wallet version v0.10.3 (64-bit) and cannot update as I am running OS X 10.6.8

I sent with a small fee, but the tickbox "send as a zero-fee transaction if possible" was ticked.

Have read the pages in the forum and see that people keep giving the advice to cancel the transaction and resend with a higher fee or to double spend.

Cannot see any way of cancelling the transaction. Have looked everywhere within Bitcoin core several times and do not see any option to cancel a transaction.

I need somebody to explain VERY simply how I achieve this or how you would be able to double spend.

I have sent many bitcoins to other addresses since and had no problems, but I still have the no confirmations with the above transaction.

Can anyone help?

Thanks for your input cr1776. I will go for 0.8.6 then.
Another quick question. Do you have to redownload all the blockchain again ?

Thanks for the pointer.
It's starting to look complicated if it doesn't work Out Of The Box.
Its just taken me literally weeks to get the blockchain up to date.
I don't really want to go through all that again.
Is there any problems with staying on 0.8.5 beta ?
What would you advise ?

what is the latest version of Bitcoin-Qt that will work with Mac OS X 10.6.8 (snow leopard)?
I have v0.8.5 beta installed, I tried to update to 0.11 but it won't run on my mac.

Thank you both.

I have 'News :Change your forum password" near the top of the bitcoin forum page, and can't find any further information.
Can anyone shed some light on why ?
Also is there a 'news' section, I can't seem to see it.