The joke continues.  As I mentioned, I posted on the OKpay forums to alert them to my service request.  After the first reply, I made another post in the same thread basically saying "My ticket number is xxxxxx someone please look at it," among other things.  I then made a second post complaining yet again that I still hadn't received a reply.

Now I look at the thread, and my first reply has been deleted (the one where I posted my ticket number).  And the OKpay representative states "We cannot find your ticket request.  What is the number?"

So they deleted my post with the ticket number, then asked for my ticket number.  Seriously what the hell are they doing over there?

Well, this is totally ridiculous and ****ty.  This issue occurred early sunday morning, so their "support" was completely unavailable all day.  Fine, I had to anxiously wait until Monday for someone to look into this.

Monday comes around and I try their phone number, which is supposed to be available from 7am - 5pm (GMT) all day.  It never works, I don't think it even rings.  From what I can tell it isn't even a valid phone number considering it won't even connect for 2 seconds before hanging up.  So as far as I can tell they just advertise a fake "emergency" number that doesn't even exist.

I created a support ticket through their customer support system, and posted on the OKpay forums about the issue.  Supposedly they respond to support tickets within 24 hours.  Well surely they will at some point on Monday address my ticket right?  After all they haven't been around all weekend, they need to catch up.  No surprise, but wrong again.  The ONLY response I get is a template response to my thread, saying that "individual issues aren't discussed on the forum" so I should "created a ticket and support will get back to me ASAP."

So basically they have no way to get in contact with them in the event of an emergency, and when they are finally alerted to such an issue, they're just like *yaaaaawwwnn* We'll get to it soon enough!  Sorry our software glitched and we've temporarily stolen your bitcoins!

Extremely disappointed in this pathetic show of customer support by OKpay.  What.  The.  ****.

The transactions have all confirmed at this point.  The initial transaction has 13 confirmations now, and the 2nd one I sent (for just 0.0005 BTC) has 9 confirmations.  I included a 0.0015 transaction fee.

Have you ever heard of this happening with OKpay's automated system?  I can see that the bitcoins have been received, so I have to assume they have access to them.  Is there any reason to believe OKpay won't be able to resolve this?  Like, I figured they would be able to see the glitch on their end, and that I never got credited with the coins.  So they could either credit my account manually, or simply send the bitcoins back to my address and let me try again.

I just tried making a USD deposit to OKpay using bitcoins, which I have done so in the past.  They requested a certain number of bitcoins according to their exchange rage (which is based on MtGox but with a commission), and I sent that amount.  Normally my deposit page then receives the bitcoins and acknowledges that I sent enough bitcoins, and then we just wait for them to get confirmed.  However this time, the page received the coins and yet is stating I did not send enough bitcoins.

Essentially they asked for .51 bitcoins, I sent .51 bitcoins, they received .51 bitcoins and are saying .51 =/= .51 bitcoins.

Does anyone have any idea what to do?  OKpay's call support isn't open Sundays, and right now my coins are just in limbo 

I see, I didn't realize that but makes sense from what I've seen.  I sent one small transaction with a really low .0001 fee and it took quite a while to get the first confirmation, but after that went as fast as my normal other ones.

Does the wallet client you're using have any affect on the transaction speed?  I'm using MultiBit right now because the full bitcoin-qt client was taking ages to sync.  However would it possibly speed up my transactions if I let it sync and used qt?

Thanks

So I understand that the transaction fees help get them processed quicker, but how exactly does it work?

Does the size of the transaction slow it down?  For example, which will get processed more quickly:

0.1 BTC + .001 fee

25 BTC + .003 fee

Cool, thanks.  I actually just watched a video tutorial on creating an offline paper wallet using bitaddress.org, so it makes a good bit more sense to me now.

One other question - if I create a wallet using a regular bitcoin client (say Bitcoin-QT), where can I locate my private keys for that wallet?

Hmm ok.  Does the bitcoin community in general consider this to be a problem, and threat to to long-term implementations of bitcoins?

The whole bitcoin system seems to be very eloquently conceived, built to handle a huge amount of growth.  Is this something the system did not initially predict and/or miscalculated?

I still don't quite understand what the physical keys are.  Are they a string of numbers/letters?  How many are there per wallet?  Is it possible to locate them somewhere within the wallet.dat file and print them?  Or say write them down by hand?  Such that if all my electronic backups of my wallet.dat were destroyed, I could input they physical keys into a wallet.dat shell, and recover my coins.

Can you elaborate on this?  There are currently people trying to make transactions that won't go through ever?  Or do you mean the people who aren't providing any transaction fee are having to wait a few hours for their transaction to make it to the to of the queue?

I still don't fully understand the technical aspects of how bitcoin transactions work, with regards to block chains and such.  However I was just reading an article which claimed the following criticism of bitcoins in the big picture:

"To prevent things from becoming completely unwieldy, the Bitcoin protocol limits the size of each “block,” the basic unit of Bitcoin’s shared transaction register, to one megabyte. Since one block is created every 10 minutes, on average, this places a hard limit on the number of transactions the network can process each hour.

Right now, the network is operating well below the limit. But it’s not that far below the limit. If the Bitcoin economy continues to grow rapidly, we’re likely to hit it in the next few years."

I really don't understand what exactly he's saying, so I am struggling to express myself clearly.  My question is, would the bitcoins system struggle to keep up with the growing number of transactions if it became widespread?  Or is this criticism unwarrented?

Here's the original article:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/timothylee/2013/04/03/four-reason-you-shouldnt-buy-bitcoins/