haha, that is what happens when a big move happens. it doesn't even matter in which direction!
price goes up, then suddenly everyone is "having good feelings" and are signing moon songs.
and then price goes down and everyone is depresses and are calling bitcoin dead!

this is actually one of the many reasons for the big swings. people get too emotional with bitcoin sometimes

well you paid less than 1/3 of recommended fee and that is why these are stuck. and as for RBF you need to contentiously rebroadcast the new transaction if you have a full node so that when the old transaction is dropped the new one is picked up in its place.

and if you have trouble with core and replace by fee see this:

not really!
the fact that a lot of ICOs are using bitcoin as the payment only shows that bitcoin is the currency they are looking for.
and don't forget that these ICOs are being created to scam people. and that means they need a lot of newbies for that, and these newbies won't have anything other than bitcoin in their pocket to invest in the ICO so they take the most popular way!

each time there is a significant rise people ask the same question and every time the answer is the same
many say they will sell if price reaches some imaginary number, that price was $300 at some point believe it not! and each time many do actually sell at that price and then either buy back at a higher price or get lucky and price really takes a dive so they can buy lower!

as for me, since i don't want to be the guy who sold at $300 and was left behind in the dust, i won't sell unless i need money.

i can't really understand the usage of an escrow in a trade like this!
i mean paypal has charge back and OP wants to pay with it!
in case other party didn't deliver, he can simply charge back! and in case the other party pays and he does a charge back no escrow can help the other party out of getting scammed!

to OP using Paypal to purchase cryptocurrencies is against Paypal's terms of services and they may block your account if they find out.

well you can't really compare them as a whole.
if OP wants to compare then he needs to specify which aspect of these is he interested in. for example Gold is better than bitcoin in being a jewelry
but bitcoin is better than gold in being a currency!
you see it is not just being digital/physical issue, these two look more like apples and oranges.

what is it exactly that you are trying to do or figure out?
if it is all the prices in one place then in poloniex on the right panel on top there is the list of all coins. you can also search the name of the coin in the text box above it to find the coin you want. and that is live price. all other third party services will give you price with delay. coinmarketcap for example has a 5 minute delay for updates.

also there is no need to see all the charts at once you can see their change in the same place with a percentage. but there was a site called cryptrader.com which allowed seeing a couple in one screen i don't know if it is around anymore.

arbitrate trading between two countries with two different fiat currency is only going to work if you already have a verified account on both places and are sure you can get money in and out of them easily or know someone who can do this with you and trust them.

in both cases the risks are high and it is a lot of work. and when working internationally and transferring fiat like that you may encounter a couple of problems too, specially if it is a large amount.

all the "most recent" coins of satoshi are from early years, from some point back then, people started pooling the work and mining farms showed up and difficulty went up that causes solo mining to die. specially with CPU!
and satoshi made bitcoin so that people don't have to "sell" anything but instead "use" bitcoin directly "instead of fiat"!

with big exchanges that have enough liquidity you won't find any arbitrage opportunity for trading and making any profit, the trading fees and also the liquidity will kill any arbitrage case.
and smaller exchanges don't have enough liquidity or security in most cases to be even considered.

and i personally prefer focusing my attention on one place, and that is bittrex. they may have been DDOSed but i never felt it as much as people are experiencing it on polo.

no sadly i don't think people in my country are that into bitcoin enough to throw a party for it's $2000 price.
but i may do it though. this actually gave the idea to put up some party invitation on my facebook to invite some friends over after price goes above $2000. that is two birds with 1 stone
i both celebrate the milestone and introduce bitcoin to a many.

it is sometimes about the risk/reward ratio.
for example sometimes (not necessarily in case of yobit and their investment, but in general) you find opportunities to make profit on some places that aren't really considered safe or good and if the profit is much more than the risk you simply do it and take the risks.

and this goes for all of them, you can see people are furious with poloniex these days and they are losing a lot of money because their platform is turned into shit because it can not handle a simple rise in their number of users. but they still go there and trade!

i usually prefer "spending" my bitcoin when price goes up. that way i even save up more money.
let's say price is $2000 and i wanted to buy something worth $2000. i first have to go on an exchange or use other ways to convert bitcoin to fiat here are the fees
- transaction fee to transfer BTC to that place
- trading fee which is usually on exchanges (~0.2%) or sell at lower price if it is another method.
- withdrawal fee to cash out the fiat (it is a percentage of $2000 which will be different in different places).
- use credit card or something and pay fees to buy that thing i wanted.

now if i buy directly with bitcoin i usually find some kind of discount too. and i only pay the transaction fees to pay the merchant!

with the way bitcoin price is rising the bitcoin fees are going to go through the roof! not only the USD value of the fees is rising but also with more price rise there will be a lot more transactions and also eventually a lot more adoption hence more transactions! and that will mess things up a lot about fees

you are correct however the time bitcoin has been around is about 8 years. the bitcoin paper was published on 31 October 2008 but the code was released on January 2009.

someone who calls himself "professor bitcoin" and uses the words "bitcoin shares"! isn't really worth paying attention to.

and i usually have the theory that people like this are now laughing at those who listened to them back then because they themselves were doing the exact opposite.

they have stopped being a faucet a long time ago when google blocked their account because they were violating its ToS. and from that time until today they have been struggling to come up with new ways of making money, with the dice games with 5% house edge to lottery and the final thing, the investment! i just hope they can manage to stay above water.

with that said it is a terrible idea to use a web service ran by a third party as your bitcoin wallet. because you don't have control and even if they don't run away you can still get hacked.

electrum is an SPV wallet so there is no "mempool" for it, the wallet connects to a server (an electrum node) and receives the transactions  and if in fact OP is successfully connecting, syncing and still seeing the transaction in his wallet means the node he is connecting to has the transaction and upgrading (although is recommended) won't solve this.

here is the tx by the way: https://www.blocktrail.com/BTC/tx/6c150312979e35e2a9cae90b0017cb50336ae9ef7f7b7ed796bc4cfb0e245b2f

every time price moves up somebody says a similar thing about the next 00 price and every time we get past it and some panic sellers only dump just to be forced to FOMO buy back in and cause the rise to speed up more.

this could have been true if the market cap grew with a more logical speed not with the speed that it grew in the past month.

did you even know that the total market cap of altcoins alone has grown about 25,000,000,000 USD in past month alone?! if that is not screaming bubble to you then maybe you don't want to hear it.

and by the way bitcoin is number because all the other altcoins are pretty terrible. if there was any half decent ones they would have already grown big not go into a pumping bubble.