It's about the number of inputs the transaction has.  OP has probably accepted a lot of dust transactions, pushing his transaction fee up.  Personally, I've also never had a fee of >$2-3 for transactions to confirm within half an hour.  Either that or he is paying excessively high fees by mistake.
Onchain transfers are fine if you don't accept loads of dust transactions.  I personally wouldn't use any offchain transfers from private companies, because they rely on trust and remove the whole point of using BTC.

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OP, you also need to understand that it's nothing to do with what wallet you're using (blockchain.info, exodus, etc).  All of them are just suggesting a fee that they believe is right for you, and most wallets will let you change that fee if you want to.  The fee is not to the service but to the miners.

I'm into a couple of stable ones which I like as well.  I'm just not a fan of the big names.

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I somewhat agree, but if it isn't needed then it won't be used.

When spammers aren't trying to push up the block size like they have been recently, the blocks don't have to be near full all the time, which means that the difficulty of running a node can still stay pretty reasonable.  The fact that it's a static blocksize increase rather than a dynamic system means that it's not particularly worrying for the future either.

The important thing is that if a 2MB hardfork happens, it's high consensus.  The implications of a 2MB max block size are not that important compared to the implications of a messy hard fork with loads of arguments.

Cloud mining groups have the benefit of lovely big places to put the miners in and more efficient use of the machinery than you would have mining with a bashed up S9 in your basement.  The problem is that I can't think of a single current cloud mining provider which doesn't just take this extra profit themselves (and a significant chunk of the rest of your money through a slow and complex process).  The concept of cloud mining is bad in that it is pro-centralisation, but a legitimate cloud mining site could exist (not that I can think of one right now).

It'll look really nice what you're getting at first OP, and you might have some nice "returns" at first, but the chances are it'll never actually reach what you put in, and if it ever does it'll be a really long time from now when the hashrate you bought hardly does anything anymore.  The thing is that you'll receive a high dollar value, but the Bitcoin value (or invested altcoin) will probably not actually reach what you put in.

In its current state, cloud mining is a bullshit system and no one should be investing, nor spamming reflinks like some idiots enjoy doing.

Errr, I don't think you've been reading...
This is absolutely nowhere close to a BTC keyboard symbol.  Just because we're part of this group doesn't mean we're important - it's not like Bitcoin is used even a hundredth as much as the dollar for example.

It's a step in the right direction to be recognised but it's not that significant.

Most cryptocurrencies other than Bitcoin are down.  ETH is down, Ripple doesn't count, Litecoin is down, ETC is down, DASH is down...

Looks like some money is slowly starting to flow back out of altcoins and into BTC.  The SegWit hype will amplify this over the next month or so.

Time to short some altcoins if you ask me.

YoBit is shady as hell.  If you want an exchange to store it on I'd suggest Bittrex, but ideally you'd wouldn't store it with someone else and would choose a software wallet such as Exodus, or use each coin's respective reference clients, backed up properly.
Go on CoinMarketCap.  You can see the pairs which are being traded and if the coin you're mining can be traded directly into fiat.  Personally I'd prefer trading to Bitcoin first.
Ideally you'd be mining yourself.  Cloud mining is seldom profitable (tell us what site you're using).  It's impossible to say which is best to "mine", because they vary based on the price and how the difficulty has adjusted to that.
Maybe you mean should you reinvest into cloud mining?  If so, the answer is no.

Probably not.  Bitfinex has been complaining of "DDoS attacks" recently, just like every exchange that enjoys doing a bit of market manipulation, insider trading and suspicious activity with your funds.  So it was probably a "DDoS attack", just like the ones that Poloniex "gets".

You'll most likely find that this happens at least once or twice per day until Bitfinex either gets their act together (if they're actually having problems) or stops being idiots (if they're not).

Like now - it's looking like scaling will be implemented, so it's a big buy (unless the code is buggy as hell, which it could be).
Unfair generalisation.  Some altcoins were relatively stable until just a few months ago when this crazy bull market/arguably bubble started (even ETH, for example).  Furthermore, some altcoins grow in a reasonably way - Byteball for example is distributing to Bitcoin holders and to existing Byteball holders, which makes the value of people's holdings increase as more Bitcoin holders get involved.

Furthermore, the majority of altcoins are traded against Bitcoin, and many of the major altcoins' charts have run nearly parallel to Bitcoin recently due to the overall bull market and trading against BTC.

Almost everyone knows what a bear market is.  It was also easy information for you to search for.

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Personally, I would move most of the ETH out - it's way overvalued, but it's just very hard to tell when the end of that situation will happen - it could go a lot higher first.

 Some of the portfolio would go into safe-ish alts like Byteball and Maidsafe (maybe some Litecoin or Monero), some would go into BTC, and the majority would go into fiat.

As the price of BTC drops I'd gradually buy in in increments, just a little bit at a time.  By the end the majority of the money would be in BTC, and when the bear market ends I'd put any remaining fiat into BTC and slowly start diversifying back into stable alts.

It's very arrogant of you to assume that a situation is fine just because you are not being affected by it.

Here's just one example of someone talking about an extremely slow withdrawal from Poloniex (8 days).

Closing the trollbox makes it impossible to access the support, because they almost don't exist.  No withdrawals from an exchange should ever be slower than a few minutes unless they suspect that you're doing some shady activities and can reasonably justify it.

Through their referral program.  As crazy as it seems, some people are investing through it.

Looking at a referral program for a company my first instinct is to think "so they're giving away >5% of the initial deposit to the referrer - that means that their profit margin must be >5%".  When you find out that Genesis Mining try their best to hide what profits they actually take and how they handle them, you realise that Genesis Mining is pure trash and that it doesn't bring profit to anyone but themselves.

Their main strategy is to pull in people who use mining calculators to mislead them into thinking they can get high profits.  They add altcoins which just soared very dramatically in value, then they try to market themselves as a stable investment until the difficulty finally catches up with the price and all the people who invested in mining that altcoin suffer horribly.

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Misleading people with oversimplified calculations I see.

You're seriously the scum of this forum.

It's nothing to do with your posts.  You could have noticed what it was about if you'd bothered to read the signature campaign thread.

This is called arbitrage trading.

Problems:

-Large buy/sell spread takes a huge chunk out of the potential profits.
-It takes a long time to deposit/withdraw, in which time Bitcoin's volatility could screw you over.
-Trading fees.

You'll find that you can only succeed in this if you have a lot of money and a solid strategy.  The problem is that the price will just even out when this is possible because everyone else has the same idea - often arbitrage trading is not actually very profitable.

Just added up the pools listed on coin.dance based on the blockchain.info hashrate distribution chart.

If both sources are accurate, it's about 66.8% hashrate support.

"Bitcoin Classic" is just a name we're using to refer to the original Bitcoin (the one we're using now).

People who say that are pretty much assuming that the BIP 148 chain will be relevant, and that if it is it will be listed as the main Bitcoin.  Whether that's true mainly depends on exchanges and merchants.

I suppose the comparison comes from Ethereum and Ethereum Classic.

Bitcoin Unlimited has not happened.

You can reduce it by having less inputs.

Think of it in fiat terms - you accept fifty coins and spend them in a shop instead of spending one.  It's a hell of a lot harder to spend that money.  The same applies in Bitcoin - the more inputs you have in your transaction, the higher the size of the transaction will be and vice versa.

So ideally you'd only accept large amounts less regularly, rather than small amounts regularly.

Last time I tried a withdrawal from Poloniex, it took a solid six hours.  All withdrawals I've ever done with Bittrex have happened within five minutes of me authorising the withdrawal via email, only waiting for as long as it takes to get several withdrawals into a batch transaction - all exchanges' withdrawals should be automated, and delayed withdrawals are a terrible sign of what they could be doing with the coins.

Regardless, at no point should we be ignoring the concerns of other people.  There have been several complaints of slow withdrawals from Poloniex recently, especially from those taking out large amounts.

The customer service of all of these services are terrible, but in that kind of situation you choose an exchange that actually works.

Honestly I'm skeptical.  It gives a lot of big names like FOX but doesn't actually link to the articles where they were mentioned.

It also claims to work with advertisers like Samsung, but it doesn't prove that either.  You'd think that they would at least have a decent website if they were that kind of company.

Not really a useful question.  Bitcoin mining in the long term will always end up being just about profitable, depending on your electricity and conditions as well as the hardware you buy (and whether the price has just shot up loads, in which case the difficulty takes a while to catch up and vice versa).

It's worth it if you can afford to buy several ASICs and a good place to keep them, and you can handle maintaining them for a couple years.  Otherwise, not really.