@ achow101: Thank you so much for your effort to cope for my questions! I very much appreciate that and have sent you a small donation. 
(Perhaps it will take quite long until the donation gets to you since I've set the fee to only 75 satoshi per bytes. My hardware wallet suggested a fee at approx. 600 s/byte which would have resultet in a much higher fee than the actual donation. By the way, at 60 s/byte I've got the error mesage "mempool min fee not met". I didn't know there is a minimum fee.)
A big thanks also to nullius for the very enlightening additions!
By the way, I also run a Bitcoin full node on a VPS.
Thank you for this very informative posts guys.
I wish you peaceful holidays.
Marcel
(Perhaps it will take quite long until the donation gets to you since I've set the fee to only 75 satoshi per bytes. My hardware wallet suggested a fee at approx. 600 s/byte which would have resultet in a much higher fee than the actual donation. By the way, at 60 s/byte I've got the error mesage "mempool min fee not met". I didn't know there is a minimum fee.)
A big thanks also to nullius for the very enlightening additions!
By the way, I also run a Bitcoin full node on a VPS.
Thank you for this very informative posts guys.
I wish you peaceful holidays.
Marcel
Youre welcome, and thanks for the kind words! May I suggest you try running a node on your own hardware, in your physical possession. Core has made great effort to keep requirements accessible; no big server or datacentre backbone connection is required. Your keys, your hardware, your security, fully decentralized and in your control. It all just fits together.
Peaceful holidays likewise.
Aside, the mempool minimum fee is a per-node rule, not a consensus rule. (Of course, most will go with the default.) That makes sense, because selection amongst consensus-valid transactions is in the discretion of miners; and:
There is no such thing as the mempool (and if there were, then we wouldnt need miners). Each and every node has a mempool [...]
Hmmm; compare and contrast the nodes view of data it has received without any attempt at Byzantine fault-tolerant ordering, and Satoshis decentralized BFT database in action:
Every node has their own copy of the blockchain, there is no "the" blockchain.
Excellent point, for obtaining a proper perspective in this particular discussion.
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This is the beauty of the blockchain design, you're arguing as if it's still 2008 and you don't get it yet. Even the corporate and government mis-information services like Bloomberg or the BBC understand what you do not about how a blockchain works.
Thats because corporate and government mis-information services consist of misinformation professionals. Also, disinformation professionalsa subtle distinction in the field of mass-scale lying.