When you attempt to sync to Geth, you will notice that quite often, Geth simply takes too long to sync. To combat this, many developers turn to Parity. It is simply a faster sync.
Another common mistake you will make is knowing for a fact that your account has a positive balance, but when you go to check the balance, you see that it has zero balance.
The reason for this is that you are probably not synced.
To ensure you are synced, while a Geth or Parity node is running, you can run the following code inside a JavaScript console:
web3.eth.syncing
You may see a JavaScript object returned, such as this:
{
currentBlock: 236124,
highestBlock: 2947915,
knownStates: 1320304,
pulledStates: 1320304,
startingBlock: 236111
}
If you see this, it means you are still currently syncing on your Ethereum client. You can see the highest block, which is 2947915, and...