I took the plunge and baught my first bitcoin last week. It was a long process but overall not a bad experience at Coinbase to buy it.
During the wait I looked to arm myself with knowledge about how to safely hang on to my coin, so I immediately withdrew it from Coinbase and sent it on over to Blockchain.info wallet; big mistake.
I spent some of my coin and have about .03 left, which equates to about $30 as of writing this. 48 hours ago I used blockchain.info's wallet to send it back to my Coinbase to cash it out, and it just sat there at unconfirmed. After hours of researching it, I concluded the wallet didn't add a transaction fee, so I had to wait 2 days for the transaction to be rejected(?) and reappear in my blockchain wallet.
This morning my coin was back in my blockchain wallet (yay!!!), so I attempt to send it to my Coinbase wallet again and this time I made sure I included a generous fee (as advised by the support at blockchain.info). 12 hours later I get the first confirmation, and to my dismay it now shows a double-spend error. I have no clue what to do at this point, and I am unsure 3+ more days of frustration are worth the effort to retrieve my $30. I have no idea what is going on, all I know is my $30 is unattainabe, and there is very little information on how to retrieve it.
I feel frustrated, ripped off, and overall had a absolute terrible experience.
A bit more education before diving in might have helped you avoid some frustration.
Yes, a transaction fee of 0.0001 BTC per kilobyte is generally recommended.
Since this is a single transaction received at an address, the transaction that sends it back out should certainly be less than a kilobyte. Therefore, a transaction fee of 0.0001 BTC should be sufficient. If you're really in a hurry, then a transaction fee of 0.0002 BTC would put you ahead of most other transactions in priority of being processed.
The "double spend" shouldn't be a concern. The new transaction should confirm just fine if it included a sufficient fee. The "double spend" warning is just something that some of the block explorers do to let others know that those same bitcoins were previously included in a transaction that has not yet confirmed.
Are you willing to share the transaction ID or bitcoin address? If so, we might be able to look at it and let you know if there is some reason it isn't confirming quickly.
Bitcoin is still in its infancy, and it is still published as "beta test" software. As such there are some technical issues that will improve with time. One of those issues is fee discovery (figuring out how much fee is necessary so you can pay enough without over paying). The underlying technology is revolutionary, but the user interface still has a ways to go.