Are you sure you correctly written down your 12 word seed phrase and didn't mix up a few words or misstyped something?
Additionally it is pretty strange that your email is no longer attached to your account. But this account should still exist and therefore a login should be possible.
You should contact the blockchain.info support for instructions how to regain access to your wallet.

If you get access to your wallet again i would highly recommend to use a wallet where you have the control over your private keys and therefore your money.
Doesn't matter whether a desktop, mobile or hardware wallet. Each of these is safer / more secured as an online wallet.
You can find an small wallet overview here: https://en.bitcoinwiki.org/wiki/Bitcoin_wallet

You can set the gap limit with this command:
Or you could create a bunch of new addresses to see if its contained in there:
false: for recieving addresses
true: for change adresses



Are you sure this address was derived correctly? He may have used the derivation path for change adresses?
The standard derivation path for electrum is 0/0/ for recieving and 0/1/ for change addresses (i think).

The miner who includes transactions into his block gets all the fees of those transactions.
If you are mining in a mining pool it completely depends on how the policy of the mining pool is regarding payout from TX fees.
AntPool for example does keep the TX and only paying out the block reward (currently 12.5 btc), contrary to BTC.com paying out everything.
You can find a detailed list of mining pools and their policies here: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Comparison_of_mining_pools

I tried to accelerate it with confirmTX.com but it seems its already queued.
But with only 10 sat/KB as fee it still could take some time until it gets included into a block.
With the current status of the network a lot people try to accelerate their TX's. The queue is long.
But for the next time you can visit https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/ to find an appropriate fee.

The ledger nano s lets you store up to 24 currencies at the moment. You can find out which those are here:
https://ledger.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/115005304449-Which-altcoins-and-tokens-are-supported-by-the-Ledger-products-
While it is true that there can only be up to 4 apps installed on it at the same time, you can just deinstall an app and install another one within 20-30 seconds.
The coins on the nano s stay safe during the whole process. They are all derivated from the seed. There is just not enough memory on the device to have more than 4 apps stored.

I hope that this just was a bad joke. BCH, as referenced by bitcoin.com as the 'real' bitcoin, is just a bad joke itself.
Changing blocksize is just a temporary fix. Its just delaying the problem. On-chain solutions to the scaling problem aren't going to be successful.
There has to be a second layer (like the lightning network, coming soon) to handle this problem.

Without the name or a link to the faucet you are talking about, we can't make any statements about this.
There are a few which payout their participants, but i think the majority aren't paying out the highest possible win as often as announced.
But faucets in general are a waste of time. And if you are into some kind of gambling, there are enough provably fair casinos around.

Transaction fees are high at the moment, yes. But this is due to a massive amount of transaction waiting to get confirmed.
Additionally we aren't too far away from lightning getting implemented as an additional layer 'on top of' bitcoin.
This will create the possibility to create/join payment channels and to not have to push every transaction onto the blockchain 1 by 1.
So the TX fee problem is being approached and is going to resolve soon.

And just because an asset 'has proven so far that the price increases' it is nowhere near a good investment.
You can't imply a rising value just because the value has risen in the past. That won't work well in the long term.

This means that the input of this TX was not confirmed before sending this payment out.
Actually there are 3 transactions 'in a row' which aren't confirmed yet. And every TX has a fee less than 100 sat /KB
This could still take some time until they get confirmed, considering the current network status (with 100k+ unconfirmed transactins).
To speed the confirmation up you could try to get this TX accelerated (may cost a fee). Or you just wait until it gets confirmed (which can take some time.. ).
You should definetly consider this trade as not finished yet.

If you are going to download a full node, then yes. The current size of the blockchain is about 150+ GB. And the verification takes quite some time.
But you could also instead just download a light weight client (without the whole blockchain). Those clients check the balance of your addresses via online services.
Like other already mentioned Electrum (https://electrum.org/#download) would be a good open-source light weight wallet. Download, install, start. No much hassle.

This has nothing to do with electrum at all. Especially since you can set custom fees..
I would really recommend to read this: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Help:Introduction and/or this: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction_fees

The network is congested at the moment (with yesterday ~200k and today 100k transaction waiting to get confirmed).
You can estimate an appropriate fee to get your transaction confirmed within a specific timeframe here: https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/

The behavior is not really "unpredictable". In the end its just simply coded. And with enough observation you can estimate how different clients
react to different kind of unusual transactions.


Replace-by-fee isn't really a double spend. A double spending TX is using already used inputs, creating a conflicting transaction.
Where to properly execute a replace-by-fee you need to have a flag set in the first transaction, which indicates that the fee might be changed in future.

Could you pls provide further information for us to be able to help you?
What wallet did you use? Do you know which encryption algorithm was used?
Are you sure your wallet gave you an encrypted address instead of an encrypted private key? or both?
Because with only the encrypted address (public key) and the password you will be able to decrypt the address but without the private key
you won't be able to spend the coins. The name of the wallet would be pretty helpful.

The only steps where BTC change addresses in an exchange's hot wallet is when
1) someone deposits some coins onto the exchange or
2) someone withdraws some coins from the exchange.

While trading there are no BTC moving around. You deposited BTC's and from this moment on they are in charge of them.
If you trade your BTC for ETH or whatever the only thing happens is that your account on this exchanges get -BTC credits and +ETH credits.
This doesn't mean that their coins have moved in the background while this trade happened.
You can compare it to tokens with 1:1 value to coins. Trading tokens (on the exchange site) is free, but withdrawing/depositing BTC's costs TX fee.
And for depositing 1 BTC you get 1 btc token (Just to simplify the whole principle).

If you downloaded a trustworthy wallet your funds (as long confirmed) should be instantly usable.
You may try to look in the transaction history to find your ingoing BTC's and look for the transaction ID.
Then you can lookup this transaction in a blockexplorer (e.g. https://blockchain.info) and check its status (unconfirmed / confirmed).
If you can't access any further transaction details in your wallet it might be a malicious application.
Like the others already mentioned, the name of the app would be pretty helpful.

After reading your post i guess you didn't even succeed in accessing the flash drive yet?
Is ist a standard USB stick? Or what kind of flash drive is it? May it be a hardware wallet? Or just a usb mass storage device?
Before downloading any wallet you should first find out how to access the flash drive and what kind of information are stored on it.
This may be some private keys in plain/encrypted text, or some wallet files (maybe wallet.dat from core?). First find out what files are stored before downloading tools to access them.
What exactly doesn't work when accessing the flash drive? Does it just don't get recognized by windows or what is happening? any error message?
Additionally i would suggest to first make a backup of your flash drive before messing around with it.. Better safe than sorry.

The crucial point is that you can use a hardware wallet for every day usage. It is pretty handy in accessing your coins and making transactions without
exposing your private keys. You can still sign transactions on an infected pc without your coins getting lost.
Standard flash drives can be written up to 1.000.000 times. Even if your usage exceeds this limit its still possible to just easily recover your coins from the
12/18/24 word seed phrase. And if you are performing this restoration also on a hardware wallet, your priv keys aren't exposed to theft anytime.
And this without any technical knowledge. So IMO hardware wallets do have quite some additional value.

No, this fee is not for you. Its like the name says a miner fee. The miner, including your transaction into his block, will get this fee.
I can recommend this link: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Help:Introduction
Since there are way more transaction waiting to get confirmed than usually, a fee of 0,000202 seems pretty low to me.
For a medium TX about 0.0008 were necessary to get a tx through fast, even higher if this TX consists of much inputs.
For future transactions you can lookup the current fee status here: https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/

Since you didn't provide any further information about how these cold storage is organized i will give you a small general procedure.
The first thing to do would be to set up a new offline linux environment (e.g. from booting media) with a wallet client of your choice (e.g. core or electrum).
Then, depending on how your key(s) is/are stored you can easily import them into the wallet, sign the message and copy it onto a (safe) usb-stick.
After you then shut down your linux environment you can then share the message from your online pc.


No, the private key does not get exposed from a signed message. That would break the whole concept of a PKI (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_key_infrastructure)

Thats rubbish. A quantum computer can't "crack ethereum and bitcoin in1 hour". Bitcoin and ethereum itself can't be cracked.
Quantum computers are no magic machines. And the development isn't furious. While it is true that quantum computers are way stronger
against elliptic curves calculations (like used in btc's key calculation), you also have to consider that there is the possibility to adjust the BTC protocol
to the current needs. Before bitcoin will get 'close' to get 'cracked', there will be an quantum-comuting-proof algorithm implemented, replacing the current one.